


Just Like the Kids in Art School Said They Would

by LayALioness



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-04-08 20:10:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4318284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven gives them each a raised brow in turn. “So is this going to be a thing, now?”</p><p>Clarke and Bellamy share a look. It’s unclear what thing Raven’s referencing specifically; them, giggling over inappropriate jokes about Greek myths? Drinking coffee from cereal bowls? Clarke’s ridiculous sweatshirt? It’s not really very clear.</p><p>“Definitely,” Bellamy decides with a grin, and Clarke grins back because yeah, they might be friends now.</p><p>Or, Clarke moves into a co-op, and Bellamy steals all their food.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Ready to Start by Arcade Fire

When Clarke meets Bellamy Blake, it’s in the front room of her new co-op, and she’s struggling with a very heavy box of books. She’s got one foot up on a stair, and the box balanced precariously half on her thigh and half on the stairwell, while she waits for Wells to come back with the roll of packing tape, for the hole in the box’s bottom that’s growing larger with each second. She’s spent all morning carrying heavy boxes, though not all were of books, and her hair is stuck in a web of sweaty tangles on the back of her neck, and she’s pretty sure the musty gym-sock smell is from her, and she’s trying very hard not to drop this box—which is why when Bellamy strides in, takes one look at her and grins cheekily, drawling _Need a hand_ , she snaps “I’ve got two of my own, thanks,” and decides she hates him.

It isn’t one of her best moments, but. He could have forgone the sarcasm, so it’s at least a little bit his fault.

Instead he just grins a little wider and says, “I’ll leave you to it, then,” and then actually _leaves_ her, wobbling on the staircase, while he heads to the kitchen, and she really does hate him now.

Wells comes back, all apologetic and breathing a little hard because he’s not the most athletic, and barely manages to tape up the hole before it’s split open completely. They get the rest of their things up the stairs without running into Bellamy again, which she counts as a personal favor from the universe. Or maybe it’s taking pity on her, who knows? She’ll take it.

He’s there for the house meeting, where Wells and Clarke and the rest of the newbies introduce themselves, and it turns out that Bellamy doesn’t even live in the co-op—he’s friends with one of the members, a pretty mechanical engineering major named Raven who’s also new, and he just sort of lounges around making small talk and eating a peanut butter-banana sandwich Clarke is pretty sure he made with the supplies in _their_ kitchen, which is more than a little rude.

Anya is the house president of Sky-Box, and Lincoln is the work manager, which seems pretty appropriate. The work manager is supposed to be a little intimidating, like a stern-faced dad doling out firm-but-fair punishments when someone forgets about or skips out on their chore hours, or skims over cleaning. To be honest, Anya’s more than a little intimidating too, but Lincoln’s a lot bigger, so he has that going for him.

There are seven bedrooms in the house, and fifteen residents, which means that most of them have to double up. Clarke and Wells had tried to get put together, but one of Sky-Box’s few rules is no roommates of opposite genders—apparently the year before they’d had an issue with one couple in particular. “They were like rabbits,” Indra said with disgust. “Nymphomaniacs, the both of them. We couldn’t get _anything_ done, they were so loud about it. We couldn’t invite anyone over—they’d all get embarrassed, and leave.”

“Seems sort of stupid,” Wells muses while they unpack boxes. Their rooms are right across the hall from one another, and it isn’t a big deal or anything, but. They have matching bookshelves and it would have been nice to live with someone they already know how to be around. “Since I’m gay and all. I’m way more likely to get it on with this roommate, than you.” His roommate is Lincoln, and Clarke’s pretty sure he’s straight, but she also hasn’t heard him speak or anything, so maybe.

Her roommate is a serious looking girl named Lexa, a Senior majoring in Linguistics. A lot of the tenants are majoring in linguistics, apparently. She’d walked in that morning, wearing nothing but a bathrobe after her shower, and had dressed completely brazenly in front of Clarke before leaving for a seminar. “Yeah,” Clarke agrees, shelving Wells’ first edition _Representable Men_.

She meets Raven—actually _meets_ , rather than waves to awkwardly as they all say their names and majors in a circle during the house meeting—in the kitchen. She’d wandered in towards the smell of spices and grease, and finds her poking at something in a pot on the stove.

“What are you making?” she asks, thinking it’s probably as good an ice-breaker as any. She doesn’t know much about Raven—she’s a sophomore, she wants to work with NASA, and she’s friends with the sandwich-thieving asshole Clarke refuses to remember by name.

“Ramen,” Raven says with a smirk, and Clarke frowns. She knows ramen; ramen has been her constant companion for years, since it’s easily microwaved, cheap, and technically constitutes as a meal. The heavenly smell currently filling the kitchen, making Clarke’s mouth salivate and her eyes water, is _not_ the smell of ramen. She would _know_.

“I’ve had ramen,” she argues, creeping closer to peek into the pot over Raven’s shoulder. It’s red-brown with spices and bubbling water. “And it does _not_ look like that.” Raven shoulders her out of the way affectionately.

“Well you’ve never had _my_ ramen,” she argues smugly, and dishes them each up a bowl.

It’s amazing, quite possibly the most delicious thing Clarke has ever had—she has to chase it down with the Greek yogurt in the fridge to stop her mouth from burning, but it’s so worth it.

Wells wanders in some time later, and Raven gives him a bowl too, which he _inhales_ , and then finishes off the yogurt. Clarke suddenly remembers she’d only come downstairs to use the shower on the first floor, and is forced to wear a towel back upstairs when she’s finished, having forgotten a change of clothes. Lexa is there when she walks in, and they lock eyes for a moment before Lexa’s trail down like the water on Clarke’s legs. She looks at the puddle forming at Clarke’s feet and smirks.

 _It’s going to be a good year_ , Clarke thinks.

Clarke learns several things very quickly about life at Sky-Box. The first is that, at least according to the other student co-ops, theirs is at the bottom of every list. Apparently most co-ops are run like some sort of democratic-republic country, fervently forcing political activism on anyone within range. Most are some variation of vegetarian, nearly all substance-free, and all with members majoring in either political science or women’s studies.

On her third day at the house, Clarke walked in on Nyko using their living room as some sort of impromptu clinic, administering lotions and a few pills to some frat kid with a rash he wanted taken care of _discretely_. He folds Nyko a wad of twenties, glances nervously at Clarke, and practically runs out the door. Nyko shrugs at her and she shrugs back; they’ve got to pay rent _somehow_.

So, what she’s saying is, she doesn’t think any of her housemates are setting out to win the Nobel prize, or anything. Anya wears something leather like, every day. She’d probably burn PETA to the ground if she could. Indra might help.

Clarke has also learned that Indra seems, for all intents and purposes, to somehow be a carnivore. It’s a medical mystery, and Clarke really wants to ask about it, but she’s not sure how Indra would react.

There’s a no-one-night-stands rule that pretty much goes unpunished, at least as far as Finn’s concerned. And at least three times a week, Clarke stumbles into the kitchen in search of coffee, to find a shirtless Bellamy Blake spreading strawberry jam on a bagel, so she’s pretty sure Raven breaks the rule too. That, or he’s part-time homeless and spends the night on the communal couch, but she’s not about to _ask_ him.

He’s taken to making her coffee in the mornings after he stays over. It’s nice, and more than welcome—no one else seems to manage her preferred cream-to-coffee ratio like he can, not even Wells—but she still doesn’t _like_ him. Sometimes they quiz each other, him on Latin declensions, her on Biology terms. It’s not like they’re friends or anything. It’s just something to pass the time.

Raven walks in on them at some point—Clarke in a bedazzled white hoody from when she was in her school’s production of _Swan Lake_ , with hair still gnarled by sleep, and Bellamy in nothing but a pair of low-hanging sweatpants that haven’t been washed in like, three _weeks_ , at least, and they’re laughing over some terrible pun about _Oedipus Rex_ (“What do you call sending a dick pic to your mom? An _Oedipus Sext_.”) and drinking coffee out of cereal bowls because there aren’t any clean mugs.

Raven gives them each a raised brow in turn. “So is this going to be a thing, now?”

Clarke and Bellamy share a look. It’s unclear what _thing_ Raven’s referencing specifically; them, giggling over inappropriate jokes about Greek myths? Drinking coffee from cereal bowls? Clarke’s ridiculous sweatshirt? It’s not really very clear.

“Definitely,” Bellamy decides with a grin, and Clarke grins back because yeah, they might be friends now.

Raven heaves a huge sigh and pours herself some coffee—in a travel cup, because she has standards.

Clarke sleeps with Lexa right before Halloween. She knows it’s predictable, that the entirety of her time at Sky-Box has been leading up to this moment, ever since seeing her roommate naked that first day—which, in retrospect, was probably very creepy. But when she slips under Lexa’s comforter in the middle of the night, tipsy and giddy from acing her first Genetics test, she’s pretty sure Lexa didn’t mind that she checked her out pretty excessively before she even knew her name.

When Raven comes to wake her up for their eight o’clock Chem Lab, she just sort of smirks at the pair from the doorway, saying “Hurry up, Casanova—we’re gonna be late.”

Clarke doesn’t necessarily think that’s fair; Raven has Bellamy over at least three times a week, and Clarke’s walked in on them twice now, and she’s only ever rolled her eyes or blushed furiously. She’s walked in on Finn and his conquests a lot more; he and Raven seem to have some sort of one-night-stand-warfare going on. She’s asked Lincoln about it, but he’d just gotten a stormy look on his face and gently-but-firmly told her to drop it. She’s asked Murphy about it too, since he and Raven have a weird kind-of-but-not-really friendship thing going on, plus she’s pretty sure they fuck in the first floor shower sometimes but she’s not positive, but he’d just glared and told her to _mind her own fucking business_ , so.

Finn is a lot less subtle, and definitely surprised, when he walks in on them in the laundry room. He’d drunkenly propositioned Clarke on her second night at the house, and she’d let him down easy, but she’s pretty sure he’d been holding out hope that she’d reconsider. After seeing her with Lexa he decides she’s a lesbian, which she doesn’t bother to correct him on. At least he’ll stop passive-aggressively flirting with her by tagging her in all his Facebook posts.

When Bellamy sees them making out against the countertop, he just says “Congratulations,” and steals a pudding cup out of the fridge, giving Clarke a salute before ambling out. By then pretty much every house member has walked in on the couple in some sort of indecent position, so it’s not exactly a secret, and she’s positive Raven must have told him already, but she’s glad he doesn’t try to _talk_ to her about it or make it a thing. She’s already had a few GSA spokespeople try to coerce her into giving a speech at their meetings or something, and it’s a little uncomfortable. She doesn’t really feel like talking about how _nice_ and _relieving_ it is to be out, when she never really had trouble with it in the first place. She’d told her parents she liked both girls and boys when she was fourteen, and took Lilly Brookeshire to Homecoming. They’d taken it in stride. Her private high school had an LGBT club, and an anti-bigotry department (which was basically a bunch of prefects with more specific guidelines and the overall air of FBI agents), and a unisex bathroom in case a student didn’t fall within any heteronormative gender roles. It was all very PC, and no one even batted an eye when she and Lilly slow-danced.

Clarke knows how easy she’s had it; she’s not an idiot. Lexa has told her about her first girlfriend, Costia, whose parents tossed her out of the house when they caught her and Lexa doing more than just _sleeping_ at a sleepover. She’s read the articles, heard the horror stories. She knows she’s one of the lucky ones, and she doesn’t feel like rubbing it in anyone’s face by waxing poetic about how _brave_ it is to finally come out. She wasn’t brave. She’d been eating a bowl of Fruit Loops at the kitchen bar, her parents reading their respective choice of newspaper, and she’d casually said “So I think I’m bisexual,” the way some kids mention an upcoming quiz in Biology. They’d sort of stared at her for a minute, and then each other, and then her mother said “How sure are you?” in a mildly curious way, and Clarke had thought about it, spoon dangling from her mouth, and said “About ninety-five percent.” And her father had said “Well, don’t think any dates of yours are getting out of a long chat just because they’re female,” and winked at her, and that was that.

Not everything in her life has been a fairytale, but she’s not naïve. She’s from a well-connected, upper class family with enough regular income that she’ll never have to worry about debt, or healthcare, or having a place to live. She’s spent the majority of her life trying to earn that sort of privilege, like somehow if she saves enough people or works in enough third-world countries, she can even out the score. She’s only ever had detention once—for throwing her shoe at some golf kid who made a crude joke about Wells (he was a _golfer_ , which shouldn’t even be a school-funded sport, _Jesus_ )—she’s never gotten below a C (in CAD, because she is absolutely _helpless_ with computers), and she never stayed out late on school nights or missed a curfew or drank at parties. She wasn’t a _saint_ , but she was the type of girl people invited over to appease their parents, saying things like _Well, Clarke Griffin’s going to be there so you don’t have to worry about me having a drive home, or there being any alcohol or anything. She’ll probably call the cops herself if it gets out of control._ It wasn’t true, of course; there was always alcohol, and loud music, but Clarke had to drive drunk classmates home more than a few times—and Wells, if he decided to go out, but he wasn’t usually invited since his dad was the Mayor and there was a good chance he’d just say no anyway.

 Wells joins the GSA, which is to be expected because if there’s any sort of cause involving equality or social-economics rights, Wells will sniff it out like a bloodhound. He’d been the only freshman on the A-B Squad (anti-bigotry department), and Clarke knows he still has the lapel pin, stuck on his corkboard.

Lexa’s in the club too, and Anya, though Clarke’s pretty sure Anya only wants to go to the courtyard powwows so she can growl at unsuspecting students as they walk by. She usually paints her cheeks with rainbow stripes like war paint. It’d be hilarious, if she didn’t somehow make it look so intense.

In the end, Lexa badgers Clarke—as much as she badgers anyone, which is to say a lot of pointed staring was involved, and maybe a few hate-crime articles printed out and casually left around their room as a sort of guilt-tripping technique. It works—enough so she agrees to go with them to the meeting held on the day after Halloween. Which turns out to be an enormous oversight on her part, because Clarke hadn’t predicted just _how much_ Raven would demand they drink on Halloween night. They go to some terrible party on Greek Row, where pretty much everyone is dressed as something cleverly _ironic_ that makes Clarke’s head hurt, while she’s dressed up as the magician from _Cats_ , which nobody recognizes. Except for the theater majors, who glare so hard she’s surprised she doesn’t catch fire.

“Dude,” Roma shakes her head, looking mildly disgusted.

“Let me guess,” Clarke says weakly. “Theater major?” Roma just nods and then walks away so no one will think they’re together.

Raven, it turns out, doesn’t really care. “Magicians are awesome,” she declares, a little slurred. Clarke squints at the drink in her hand; she’s pretty sure the color’s changed. “So are cats. _Magician cats_ , are, like, _awesome squared_ , so. Fuck them,” she shrugs, “Is basically what I’m saying.” She’s dressed as a sexy astronaut, which basically means the helmet from an old-fashioned, legit space suit that Clarke’s pretty sure was involved in the Moon Landing, and a set of tastefully sequined, red lingerie. She’s wearing moon shoes. It’s the best.

“I’m an _asstronaut,_ ” she’d declared when she met Clarke at the bottom of the stairs. She’d frowned. “Or _sasstronaut_ ,” she amends. “I couldn’t decide.”

“ _Asstronauty_ ,” Nyko offers on his way to the kitchen. They’d decorated Sky-Box the day before, stringing fake cobwebs throughout the house, and dangling little puffy spiders with googly eyes and pipe cleaner-legs from the ceiling. There are a few roles of the super cheap one-ply toilet paper (because why waste the good stuff?) in the trees in their yard, and the back half of a witch and broom stick stuck to the wall, so it look like she flew straight into it.

“Don’t drink and fly, kids,” Indra had warned seriously while hanging it up.

Raven and Clarke—sans Roma, who went upstairs with one of the frat boys. Or maybe it was a sorority house, and she went with a girl; Clarke wasn’t sure—managed around dawn to somehow walk up the stairs like two leaning towers of Pizza, holding themselves upright, to collapse in Raven-and-Roma’s room. Bellamy’s already asleep on the couch when they walk in, and Clarke gives a single lazy drunken thought, _Is he actually homeless?_ before promptly forgetting about him and falling asleep.

Lexa and Anya wake her bravely in the morning, just a few hours later for the meeting. They look a little smug, and more than a little condescending about it. Wells, at least, seems appropriately pitying, and hands her a to-go cup of coffee. She takes it without complaint and downs the whole thing, because she needs the caffeine, and is only a little sorry that it wasn’t made by Bellamy. He’s gone by the time they leave, which she’s kind of sad about. She’d been hoping to talk to him about the whole homeless thing. She’s pretty sure she saw a basket of boy’s laundry in the corner of Raven’s room, and while it could belong to any one of her male roommates, she knows the _There’s an i in MEATPIE_ shirt is definitely his, because it had sparked a long and heated debate about the merits of social commentary in horror, and also which Simon Pegg film is best. She’s all about _How to Lose Friends and Alienate People_ , but he stands firm about _Shaun of the Dead_.

She’s also pretty sure most of the books on Raven’s shelves are his, because Raven doesn’t really strike her as a Walt Whitman sort of person, and also because the copy of _Oedipus Rex_ is filled with notes in his hideous shorthand.

The meeting goes about as well as Clarke expected—she nearly falls asleep in the back and spends her time doodling. Mostly she draws Raven flying a spaceship, visiting different house members on different planets, like in _The Little Prince_. Lexa taps her gently on the ribs a few times to make her pay attention, but other than that, Clarke keeps to herself.

She finds Raven in the kitchen when they get back—wearing her red lingerie, with an old ratty Ramones tee tossed over, probably only because Lincoln asked her to. Lincoln’s biggest fear, it turns out, is accidentally objectifying a woman. It’s great because Raven, Lexa, Roma and even Luna their resident feminist have the habit of walking around in as little clothing as possible, usually underwear, or they’ll lounge around in towels after a shower, refusing to get dressed. Lincoln will take one short look around the room and shut himself off upstairs to paint, or have an aneurism. Murphy will lurk around making dick jokes until inevitably one of the girls throws something at his head. Lexa tossed a kitchen knife at him once, a little too nonchalantly, and it left a tiny scar on the tip of his ear. Clarke wishes she could say he learned his lesson.

John Murphy is the type of person they interact with only when absolutely necessary—except for Raven and Emori, who seem to actually _enjoy_ his company for whatever reason—and only because he signed up for the house early enough and they didn’t realize he was kind of horrible until it was too late to kick him out for anything less than criminal behavior. And while he definitely drinks underage, and Clarke’s pretty sure he smokes pot with Finn and Nyko in their room with towels stuffed under the door gap, they’re not about to call campus police for that. So instead they suffer through him, ignore him, and otherwise wait him out. Clarke’s sure that eventually he’ll get tired of Lincoln hunting him down for missing chore hours, or having to clean the upstairs bathroom, or making a house dinner twice a month. (His first dinner night, he made everyone cheese quesadillas in the microwave. They weren’t terrible, but. Emori’s first night, she made Zrazai and beer pastry puffs, and it’s sort of hard to beat that.)

Lincoln is in her studio painting class, so when he walks in to find Clarke with his arms covered in greens and reds and blues, she’s not really so surprised. She is, though, when he holds out a thick brush like an offering. “I thought you might want to help,” he shrugs, and she tugs on her boots and follows him outside.

It was Indra’s idea, strangely enough, and it’s definitely too big for Lincoln to finish alone. A mural across the west side of the house. He’s already started on the trees, but according to his sketched out plan, there’s going to be an entire solar system between the second story windows, and a river somewhere in the middle, with some trees and school buildings scattered in between. It’s a masterpiece, and he was right; she does want to help.

It takes them a week and a half to finish the whole thing, with house members intermittently coming out to help. Indra likes filling in the lines, apparently, and Lexa’s pretty good at mixing colors. Finn does well with stars, and Raven isn’t at all artistic so she mostly supervises and sets up an i-pod dock on the grass. Bellamy takes to passing Clarke her different paints and brushes so she doesn’t have to keep going up and down the ladder—if anything, he’s more nervous about it than she is, constantly holding onto the base and complaining about it wobbling. It’s endearing, but she learns to tune it out.

They eat dinner outside the night they finish, even though it’s almost Christmas and sort of freezing. They roast marshmallows and drink hot chocolate with peppermint sticks crushed up at the bottom, and maybe some Bailey’s, too. Real eggnog, the kind with bourbon, has recently turned into Clarke’s favorite drink. They all take turns, taking pictures with the mural, and pointing out their favorite parts. Near the bottom, everyone has painted their initials in different colors and handwriting, like kindergarten kids signing macaroni pictures. Even Bellamy’s are there, a bright orange BB hanging crooked near the grass. He passes Clarke a mug of eggnog, perfectly spiced, and so hot it burns her fingers.

Clarke has learned several things about living in a house with fourteen other people—she’s learned how to quadruple a recipe for lasagna, and that for every meat dish she makes, she should probably include something vegetarian, just in case. She’s learned that they should stock up on Greek yogurt whenever it’s Raven’s night to cook, or Anya who has a competition going with Raven to see whose chili will make Finn cry first. She’s learned that she should sign up for cleaning duty within the first few hours, because any later and she could be stuck with the first floor bathroom—it has the shower, which. Shower drains are basically a nightmare. With lots of human hair.

She’s learned that if the theater club is doing anything—anything at all—she has to avoid Roma _at all costs_ , so she doesn’t get roped into helping. She’s learned that if Luna is surrounded by scraps of fabric on the living room floor, she shouldn’t ask about it unless she wants to spend her afternoon as a human pin cushion. She’s learned that if she sees Nyko turning the front room into a makeshift clinic, he’ll ask her for a second opinion on whatever he’s diagnosing. (He’d been very excited to learn she was pre-med, and she’s now seen a lot more live examples of Herpes, Crabs, and Chlamydia than she’d ever wanted.)

She’s learned that if she’s having trouble with English, she should ask Finn or Emori; if she’s having trouble with math, she should ask Anya or Tristan—and she could ask Murphy, but why would she do that?; if she’s having trouble with science, she should ask Raven, because if Raven finds out she went to anyone else, she spends a few days working angrily on a robot Clarke’s pretty sure will be programmed to kill; if she’s having trouble with French, she should ask Lexa—Anya, Indra and Gustus are all also majoring in linguistics, but only one of these options is Clarke’s kind-of-girlfriend, so. If she’s having trouble with history, she could go to Indra or Gustus, but she always goes to Bellamy instead, and usually at three in the morning. He’s always awake at their kitchen table, and she has a weird sleep schedule that’s based around when she decides to finally collapse somewhere.

They’re sitting at the table, going over the notes from her Ancient Palestinian History seminar at four-forty-five in the morning, when Raven drifts in. It’s usually Raven that finds them like this in the early morning—or at least, Raven’s the only one that ever reacts to it. The others have all wandered in at some point or another, and taken it in stride. Well, Wells thinks it’s sort of funny, “Who has a study date at _four AM?_ ,” but other than that.

Raven pours herself some water and then turns to stare down at them with a raised eyebrow while she sips from her cup. She’s wearing what used to be a The Vaccines tee, before she’d hacked at the sleeves and neckline. Her underwear is lacy, blue, and very see-through. Clarke coughs and looks away. Bellamy’s noticed and is trying not to laugh, so she elbows him in the ribs. The nice thing about taking so many different Anatomy classes is that she knows the perfect places to dig her sharp joints in.

“What exactly is so important you couldn’t save the learning until sunup?” Raven drawls, voice scratchy from sleep. Clarke isn’t really sure that’s fair; she knows for a fact that whenever Roma spends the night out, Raven stays up to tinker on her robot. She and Bellamy share a look.

“Whether or not the word _Palestine_ came from an ancient donkey God, or some root drink,” she decides, and Bellamy snorts.

Raven rolls her eyes and sets her cup in the sink. “You two disturb me,” she decides, sitting across from them and snatching at one of Clarke’s blank index cards. She starts writing something in Spanish, and Clarke’s pretty sure it’s a death threat—not for her, but for someone. Raven seems the type to send a death threat in Spanish. She could probably follow up on it, too.

Finn finds them like that, bright and early for his six-AM jog. He hesitates a little before getting his Nalgene of water, and gives a small nod to Bellamy and Raven, a weak wave to Clarke, before leaving. Clarke eyes her tablemates for a moment, before deciding to just ask.

“So, you guys and Finn,” she starts, trying for nonchalance and probably failing. Bellamy’s trying to give her a meaningful _look_ , but she can’t really read it. “What’s up with that?” He snorts, and Clarke ignores him.

“We grew up together,” Raven shrugs, like it’s no big deal—except Clarke hasn’t seen her and Finn ever actually _speak_ to each other, so. She’s pretty sure there’s more to the story. “We dated for like, forever, but then at high school graduation he said he wanted a break, so we could find ourselves or whatever at college. He wanted to see other people. He, uh. I didn’t tell him I was going to his school. I’d wanted to surprise him.” Raven makes a face. “He was definitely surprised.”

Clarke just stares for a minute, because Raven Reyes is one of the most gorgeous women she’s ever seen, en route to work for fucking _NASA_ building rockets, and she makes stupidly hilarious, dark jokes, and she knows like five different pickup lines in Klingon off the back of her hand, and _Finn wanted to see other people_? He should have _married_ her. “Huh,” Clarke decides, and then shakes her head. “No, actually, sorry— _what_? He’s an idiot, seriously. Can I join the chili thing with you and Anya? I suddenly want very much to see him cry.”

Raven shrugs, like it’s still no big deal, but she’s smiling which is a good sign. Bellamy is silent, but he’s grinning too, so Clarke’s pretty confidant she said the right thing. “I can’t be that mad, you know? I mean, I’d rather not date if he’s not as serious about it as I am.”

“How’d you both end up at Sky Box?” Clarke can understand not hating Finn, and even going to the same school as him since it’s a great university, but it has to be hard, living just a staircase apart.

“Roma. Housing fucked me over my freshman year, and I’d met her at Orientation, and she gave me the co-op forms to fill out, so. There weren’t as many people last year, so they were kind of desperate. I didn’t know Finn was here until the first meeting, and by then I was pretty set on living here. Plus it was fun making him squirm. I think we’re both sort of waiting for the other to just get too uncomfortable and leave.”

“The one-night-stand warfare,” Clarke nods, understanding. Bellamy huffs out something caught between a cough and a laugh, while Raven just smirks.

“The _what_?” Bellamy cough-laughs.

“You know,” Clarke waves a hand. She isn’t really clear on whatever it is Bellamy and Raven have, so she doesn’t want to make it awkward by pointing out Raven’s other _friends_. But instead the pair of them just shake their heads.

“ _One-night-stand warfare_ ,” Raven repeats, incredulous. “ _Jesus_.”

“It has a ring to it,” Bellamy admits, poking a highlighter at Clarke’s cheek so she swats at him.

Clarke waits until he leaves for class to corner Raven in her room. Roma isn’t there, which isn’t unusual, so Clarke shuts the door behind her and perches on the empty bed. Raven doesn’t bother glancing up from her computer, until Clarke says “So is Bellamy homeless?”

Raven looks at her blankly, before bursting out in laughter. “ _Homeless_? Why would you think he’s homeless?”

Clarke gives a wave to the basket— _baskets_ , suddenly there are two—of his clothes, and a pile of Greek mythology anthologies that weren’t there the day before. Raven’s mouth makes an _o_ of understanding.

“He’s not homeless,” she shrugs. “His apartment’s like forty-five minutes away, and his roommate’s kinda shady, so I let him keep some stuff here. Why?” She cuts her eyes at Clarke. “Does it bother you, when he stays over?”

“No,” Clarke says, probably a little too fervently, but. She’d just been worried about him; she doesn’t want Raven to think she wants him gone. Clarke likes Bellamy—she’s pretty sure he’s one of her best friends, which is a little weird since her only close friend has ever been Wells and now she has two, three if she counts Lexa which she’s not sure she should since she and Lexa don’t really do much together besides making out. “I don’t have a problem with it.”

“Yeah I bet you don’t,” Raven says knowingly, and Clarke frowns. She and Lexa haven’t really talked about what they’re doing together, what exactly they are, and she’s not sure if Lexa sees them as exclusive, but. Either way, Clarke is a one-person-at-a-time girl.

“I’m with Lexa,” Clarke says. The last thing she wants is Raven thinking she’s like Finn, and Raven seems to catch on because her smirk is gone.

“I know,” Raven says. “I was just kidding.” She adds “Sorry,” as a sort of afterthought, but Clarke waves it away. She glances down at the half-finished robot, squatting in a pile at the foot of Raven’s bed.

“Is that for a class?” she asks.

“That’s for our future, Clarke,” Raven says seriously.

Roma finds her later that day, and Clarke doesn’t manage to duck out in time. Her last class was canceled so she can’t use that as an excuse, and she’s still in her pajamas so she can’t pretend to be headed out. It was a definite oversight, on her part.

“Hey, Griffin,” Roma says. She calls everyone in the house by their last names, and Clarke isn’t sure if it’s meant to be a nickname sort of thing, or if Roma has problems with intimacy. She’s taking Psych 101, and it’s kind of hard for her to not analyze things like that now. “Are you doing anything next month?”

“Uh,” Clarke says, racking her brain. She’s pretty sure she’s doing a lot next month, but nothing special comes to mind, which is unfortunate. Roma grows more assured by the second, and waves a hand.

“Great, we’re doing _Mattress_ , and we need a new art director.”

“What,” Clarke says, because she didn’t really understand anything Roma just told her. Roma’s a theater student, so Clarke’s fairly sure she’s referencing a play of some sort, but. One never really knows with Roma.

“The drama club,” Roma huffs, like it should be obvious. And well, she’s sort of right. “We’re doing a play, and our art director dropped out at the last minute to work with the county theater, the traitor, so we need a new one. Lincoln’s swamped with work, so you’re our best bet.”

Clarke knows for a fact Lincoln is _not_ “swamped with work,” and she’s a little bitter that he’s put her in this position. (It’s unfair, she knows; she should have just made an excuse when she could.) She only sighs a little, and Roma pretends not to notice. “Okay,” she decides, and Roma grins like a shark.

Wells, it turns out, is another victim of Roma’s, along with Bellamy and Luna—though Luna doesn’t really count since she volunteered to do the costumes. Wells is incapable of lying, or otherwise dodging favors. Instead he just awkwardly lets himself be talked into literally all sorts of situations, and hopes either Clarke or destiny will get him out of it. Usually Clarke does, like when girl scouts cornered him at grocery stores, or when the public librarian managed to have him do her work for two weeks without pay. But in this case, Clarke’s just glad to have someone she knows at rehearsals.

It turns out the art director really only works on the props, mostly painting and rearranging plywood trees and castle towers. She gets a headset, which is cool and makes her feel like a professional something, even if the mic is a little duct taped. The tech guy is in Raven and Bellamy’s year, named Wick, and likes to do Sean Connery impressions over the headset when he’s not working the spotlights. And when he is working the spotlights, he sings ABBA off-key. Clarke doesn’t actually know what he looks like.

 _Mattress_ is the non-musical version of _Once Upon A Mattress_ , which is in turn a version of _The Princess and the Pea_. Clarke reads the script, and then the Wikipedia page just in case, and then she suggests the cast and crew watch the original televised versions at Sky-Box.

“You just wanted to get out of rehearsal,” Bellamy accuses, trying to toss popcorn down the back of Wells’ shirt from their spot on the sofa. Wells is playing the role of Dauntless, and is studying the film seriously, so he’ll get it right.

“What rehearsal? I paint trees all day,” Clarke shoots back. Bellamy has to play the Minstrel, which he’s not at all happy about. Apparently the drama club is made up of eleven girls and one boy, who’s already been cast as the King. Roma is predictably Aggravain. When Clarke asks why she didn’t want to play the princess, Roma shrugs and says, “The evil queen has more power.”

“What fucked up episode of Twilight Zone is this?” Raven asks, staring at the costumed and paint-stained troupe in the living room.

“The one where you fall madly in love with me, we get married, and have two-point-five cyborg children,” Wick pipes up from his spot on the floor. He somehow looks exactly how Clarke imagined, down to the converse and mismatched socks.

Raven just rolls her eyes and leaves, which is more of a surrender than Clarke has ever seen her give, and she turns to ask Bellamy about it, but he’s following Roma out to the bathroom.

They rehearse through the month, and Clarke finishes the set just a week before the opening night, which sees her watching backstage, eating eggrolls between acts. Apparently they’re considered good luck by the club, through some convoluted inside joke she doesn’t get, but. She’s not about to turn down free eggrolls.

Things go wrong, of course. Every night. Opening night, the machine that’s supposed to play the doorbell doesn’t go off, and Bellamy-as-Minstrel is forced to improvise, saying “Ah! That must be the princess—only a princess can knock so silently.” The audience laughs, and Clarke lets out a breath.

The second night, Roma completely walks out of her shoes by accident, but she just keeps marching, decreeing a law against shoes. The third night, one of the tree’s anchor slips and it goes crashing down while the cast stares in horror. Once it’s down, Bellamy says “It’s protesting the Queen’s new law against trees.”

“The boy’s a natural,” Wick says in Clarke’s ear, and she can’t help but agree. “Think I should put the green light on him and make him look like Shrek?”

On the last night, Lexa brings her flowers and she has to bow with the rest of the cast and crew on the stage, in her paint-stained jeans and baggy plaid shirt. Raven wolf whistles from the audience. Bellamy grabs her hand and doesn’t let go.

The end of her freshman year sort of sneaks up on Clarke. She’d known it was coming, of course, but it’s different to realize in the middle of a beer pong game that _this is her last week here_. She’s also a little bit drunk, so she stumbles to the back porch of the frat house and sinks down on the steps to think about things, and also make the world stop shaking.

Someone sits beside her, and she doesn’t have to look to know it’s Bellamy. He uses some sort of cinnamon-scented bodywash or deodorant or something, so. “I thought you were good at beer pong,” he teases.

“I am _great_ at beer pong,” Clarke argues, which isn’t really true. She’s pretty good, but not extraordinary. “It’s my last week,” she says in explanation.

“Yeah,” Bellamy nods, slinging an arm around her. He’s been doing this since they all got back from Christmas vacation. Well, since Clarke got back—Bellamy had spent the week at Sky-Box with Raven and his little sister, home from her boarding school. Clarke had met her briefly on her first day back; Octavia, a pretty seventeen year old in a pair of fleece pajama pants and one of Bellamy’s old shirts. “But you’ll be back next year.”

She will be, she knows. She’s already put in the paperwork to live in Sky Box, and it was approved pretty much immediately. She never missed a cleaning day, or dish duty, and she didn’t owe any chore hours and always paid rent on time. Comparatively speaking, she was pretty much the perfect housemate. The thought makes her a little miserable.

“I thought college would be more _fun_ ,” she despairs, and Bellamy frowns down at her.

“Did you not have fun?” he asks. Clarke thinks about Margarita Midnight, when she and Raven and Roma and Luna had all tiptoed downstairs to get drunk on sickly sweet alcohol and have an impromptu conga line around the kitchen island.

She thinks about Wells’ ridiculous chess party, held completely unironically when some Greek Row meathead accused them of not being able to host a good turnout. It was a terrible turnout—barely fifteen people, not including the house members, most of whom didn’t even show. Bellamy did, and he was actually pretty good at chess, but he left early to spend the night at his apartment for once. “This place is too hyped for me,” he’d teased as he’d left.

She thinks about Anya making her enormous meatloaf for the house dinner, while Luna visibly wilted from the table, asking weakly about salad. Clarke had been sure she’d just melt into the floor, until Anya smirked and explained that the second meatloaf was actually tofu and bean paste. Everyone seemed to breathe out as one, relieved.

She thinks about the play.

She thinks about Lexa. She’s been thinking a lot about Lexa lately—she’s a senior, so she won’t be back next year, and she’s moving to Costia’s town anyway. She’d been graceful about the breakup—if that’s what it was—and Clarke wasn’t even really upset about it, though she didn’t say no when Raven and Wells dragged her out for Chinese food and root beer floats.

“I had fun,” Clarke decides, leaning heavily on Bellamy because he’s warm and he smells nice and she’s still pretty drunk. “I just thought I’d—I don’t know. Get loose.”

“Get loose?” His throat rumbles against her head.

“Footloose,” Clarke mumbles, and he laughs. “I was—you didn’t know me in high school, but I was like, the good girl. The one kids would use to convince their parents to let them go out, you know? I mean, I threw a shoe at someone once, but—”

“You threw a shoe at someone?” Bellamy asks, amused.

“He deserved it,” Clarke argues. “But that was the worst thing I ever did. I thought,” she stops, trying to remember where she was going with this.

“You thought, what, college would turn you into some daredevil bank robber?” Bellamy teases, and he’s kidding, but he’s sort of right. She didn’t think she’d become a criminal or anything, but. She expected at least _some_ changes. But she still turned in all her assignments on time, sometimes early, and always did the extra credit. She still emailed her professors if she didn’t understand something. She still color coded her notes.

“I thought it’d make me more interesting,” she decides.

“You are interesting,” Bellamy says. “You’re awesome. You don’t need to put a cow in the dean’s office to be cool.”

Clarke snorts. “You should get that on a shirt.”

“I already did,” he says, completely serious. She can’t tell if he’s kidding, and squints up at him.

“Why were you so awful on my first day?” To be honest, Clarke’s sort of wanted to ask about it since their argument about Simon Pegg, but she’s always stopped herself. She’s not even sure he’ll remember.

“I was trying to hit on you,” he shrugs, like he hasn’t just completely alter her worldview. “Badly. You were cute, and struggling, and I was going to swoop in and save you or whatever, but it kind of backfired.” Clarke can’t really find a response, so he rambles on. “It’s probably a good thing,” he decides. “I just would’ve messed it up, and this way we can be friends, so.”

Clarke wants to say, _You wouldn’t have messed it up. Try again._ But he’s right; this way, at least they’re friends. “Best friends,” Clarke amends, and he grins fondly.

“Best friends,” he agrees. “Feeling better?”

“Not much,” Clarke admits, and throws up on his shoes.


	2. You'll Think I'm So Great (Naked and Breakfast)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke's second year in the co-op

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from Pretenders by Antennas Up

Wells spends the first two weeks of summer with her in their hometown, and she later learns it was mostly because he was trying to figure out how to tell her.

In the end, he shows up at her door ten minutes to midnight, still wearing his pajama pants with all the constellations on them, and an old American Eagle sweatshirt. She’s barely opened the door when he blurts, “I’m moving to China.”

Clarke blinks back at him; she’s pretty sure he’s not joking. Wells is terrible at jokes. “What?”

“It’s an exchange program,” he explains. “I’m going to Macau, to study there. I’ll be interning at an observatory.”

“Uh,” Clarke says, not really sure where to go from here. Finally, she decides on “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Wells shrugs a little helplessly. Frankly, she’s surprised he didn’t tell her the moment he found out. She’s trying very badly to not feel hurt. “I didn’t know for sure it wouldn’t fall through,” he admits. “I didn’t tell anyone, really. Just Lincoln, so he could take care of the house paperwork, and my dad. I didn’t want to jinx it.”

“You could have told me,” Clarke says. She was the first person he told when he thought he was gay. She was the first person he told about his mom getting sick. He was the first one she called after her dad’s accident, and the first she told about her crush on Lilly. In comparison, a year-long stay in China isn’t _that_ serious, but. He could have told her—he could tell her anything, and she thought he knew.

“It wasn’t,” he hesitates, trying to choose his words carefully. Wells speaks like a diplomat. “It wasn’t that I didn’t _trust_ you or anything,” he explains. “I just—we’ve never really been apart, not like this. I was kind of freaking out about it.”

“I could’ve helped you pack or something,” Clarke argues. “Quizzed you on your Mandarin.”

“Cantonese,” Wells corrects with a smile. “They speak Cantonese there.”

“I could’ve quizzed you on that too.” She sits next to him on the porch swing, toes grazing the wood. “When do you leave?”

“In the morning,” Wells sighs. “I’m still kind of freaking out.”

“See? If you’d given me more warning, I could’ve looked up reassuring statistics on plane crashes,” Clarke points out. Wells snorts.

“Thanks.”

“Any time. Want me to drive you to the airport?”

Wells frowns, apologetic. “I already promised my dad…”

“That’s fine,” Clarke waves a hand, and then tries to hug him but the angle’s made awkward by the swing’s metal chains. “Don’t get kidnapped or mugged or anything,” she orders, voice muffled by his shoulder.

“I’ll try,” Wells promises, and then crosses back over to his house.

Clarke isn’t really sure what to do with the rest of her night, now that sleep is out of the running. She has an ongoing Words with Friends war going on with Raven, where they use only terms that could double as euphemisms for sex or sex organs, but she’s holding out for a second p to make _gobstopper_. So she texts Bellamy instead.

She got his number when the cast and crew exchanged information at the first _Mattress_ rehearsal, which is an absurd way to get the number of someone who is already your friend.

She types, _My best friend is moving to China tomorrow._

He replies almost instantly, which is sort of surprising. She’s not totally sure what he does late at night but she does know he’s working full-time at a bar over the summer, and she’d sort of assumed midnight was prime bar-hour.

_MINSTREL: but im right here tho_

_Clarke: I meant the cute one. What does China have that I don’t?_

_MINSTREL: ah that clears it up. better chinese food? actual culture? badass dragons?_

_Clarke: I have culture. Also dragons._

_MINSTREL: lies where are ur dragons how dare u have dragons and not share._

_Clarke: They’re shy, mild dragons that like to stay home and draw all day._

_MINSTREL: clarke u are not a dragon and neither are ur cats._

Clarke glances at Smaug, lounging on her bedroom windowsill. He’d gotten a lot bigger while she was at school, and now rolls of his belly hang over the sill, along with his tail and two back feet. His face is pressed against the screen, like he might be able to seep out into freedom through the netting.

_Clarke: You can’t prove that. How’s your summer going?_

_MINSTREL: spectacular, best yet. i love working minimum wage jobs depending on shitty tippers and my shitty roommate to get the rent paid._

Clarke has another pang of guilt, remembering that even though she doesn’t have to worry about her living arrangements, or financial security, someone as hard-working and genuinely good as Bellamy Blake still struggles to make it through the summer. During the school year, he gets an allowance from his scholarship, but his summers aren’t funded.

She spends an embarrassing amount of time trying to decide how best to respond. She’s pretty sure he just needed to vent, and isn’t actively searching for pity, or even solutions to his problem—not that she really has any. She could offer to let him stay with her in her parent’s house, but that’s more than a little presumptive, and she’s not sure how her parents would react to suddenly having a guest.

Her next offer would be letting him stay at Sky-Box, which she knows is being looked after by Raven because she sort of hates the woman that raised her. (Who isn’t her mother—but that’s about as much as Clarke knows about Raven’s family life. She’s learned to not ask about house members’ family lives, just as a sort of general rule.) But, again, the offer would be presumptive, and she’s pretty sure Raven already suggested it anyway. So instead she tries her hand at humor, because she’s basically a coward when it comes to comfort.

_Clarke: Would you like a dragon?_

_MINSTREL: what kind of question is that of course yes r now please_

She spends the rest of the night sending him pictures and videos of Smaug and any other adorable baby things she can find on the internet, and falls asleep with his icon picture blinking at her face.

That’s pretty much how she spends her summer—texting Bellamy when he isn’t working, and sometimes when he is, and he sends her pictures of complicated alcoholic drinks he thinks she’ll like, or girls he thinks she’ll find hot. She does, usually, but he never sends her pictures of any of the guys, which she doesn’t even try to read into.

She plays Words with Friends with Raven, and their rules get even more ridiculous. Clarke draws the line at _only words that rhyme with cock_ , but by then they’re already too far gone.

She emails Lincoln a few times, but he’s spending his summer backpacking through the mountains with only a tent and his art supplies. He’s taken Finn with him, God knows why, so Clarke’s Facebook feed is a lot less cluttered than usual. She emails Wells a few times too, because his wifi connection isn’t good enough for Skype. It’s a lot less than normal, but. It beats moping around her room all day.

She spends most of her time in the hospital, visiting her dad. There’s a Starbuck’s in the lobby, and vending machines down the hall, and his room has free internet, so it’s not terrible. It’s exactly as she remembers. He’s exactly as she remembers, though maybe a little older. His hair’s more gray than blond now, but his face is unchanged. There’s still the familiar whirr of his breathing machine, and the smell of cold antiseptic. His window has the nicest view in the wing, even though he can’t see it. Clarke sketches picture after picture of him, as she remembers, and as he might be when he wakes up. She doesn’t draw him sleeping.

She eats dinner with her mom each night. Abby has always been a workaholic, but Jake and Clarke drew up a contract when Clarke was seven, with rules like _always comes to my spelling bees_ , and _always home for dinner (or when we go out)._ It’s been years, and the list itself is probably long gone by now, wasting away in some landfill, but Abby still never misses a dinner.

They cycle through a range of take-out menus, and then frozen meals from Wegman’s, because Jake was always the cook in the family. Clarke does make Raven’s ramen one night, and Anya’s chili, and Bellamy’s Adobo, which is probably the hardest. Abby watches her, squinting down at the recipe from her phone, amused.

“I didn’t know you were double-majoring in culinary arts,” she teases, and Clarke makes a face.

“I’d flunk,” she decides, and Abby laughs, but then eats pretty much the whole carton of yogurt Clarke bought. Abby’s taste buds are only a little less delicate than Finn’s.

When Clarke next sees Bellamy, she’s standing at the foot of the stairs in Sky-Box, and he walks in, and she instantly has a wave of de ja vu. Until she notices the box in his hands, marked _bell’s stupid book stuff_. She’s rooming with Raven this year, and they already claimed what used to be Anya’s, because it’s bigger and has what could be considered a balcony by someone with low expectations.

“Need a hand?” she drawls, in a mocked-up version of his voice.

Bellamy laughs so hard he nearly drops the box and then says, “Sure thing, roomie,” and winks.

“What?” she asks taking the box. It’s surprisingly light, which means it’s mislabeled. Bellamy rubs at the back of his neck, suddenly nervous, and is about to answer when Wick comes crashing in, carrying a box of his own.

“Hey, Clarke,” he calls out cheerily, and then turns to Bellamy. “So where are we, exactly? I was told basement—I’m kind of holding out for basement, really. We can be the co-op goblins.”

“You guys are living at Sky-Box?” Clarke frowns, trying to understand why no one seems to tell her things, anymore. Bellamy must catch onto her thought process, because he’s quick to speak, which he only does when nervous.

“I wanted to surprise you,” he explains, snatching Wick’s box like he needs something to do with his hands. Wick only shrugs and heads back out, probably for more boxes. “I, uh, I know I didn’t make the best first impression here, but. Do-over?”

Clarke shrugs and heads towards the basement stairs, so he won’t see her blushing. _She’s_ not sure why she’s blushing, but—well, it’s nice to know he’d been thinking about their first meeting, too. “Of course,” she calls back to him. “It’s cool that you’re going to actually _live_ here, instead of just living here.”

“Plus this way I’ll have to pay rent,” he chirps. “And do dishes.”

“You did dishes before,” Clarke points out, because it’s true. Often she’d remember she had dish duty at like two AM, but when she got down there he’d be standing at the sink, almost finished. They’d stay up for three more hours, going over notes or _American Gods_ or whatever, and then she’d let him flick the chore chart.

The chore chart is a refurbished Twister spin-chart, with the house members’ names taped over the different colors, and the chores taped over left/right, and whenever one member finished their chore, they got to flick the arrow for the next person. Indra had come up with it after Anya and Lincoln’s in-depth spreadsheet just kept confusing people. They hung it up in the kitchen, right under the cats-in-hats calendar.

“Yeah but now you and Raven won’t get in trouble,” Bellamy argues, setting his box down next to hers on his bed. Most of his furniture has already been moved in here, which makes sense; he’s had all of summer break to do the heavy lifting. A second bed which must be Wick’s is in the far corner. She stares at it so she isn’t staring at Bellamy’s.

“We never got in trouble,” Clarke scoffs. “Lincoln’s harmless.” He’d mostly just looked sternly at the girls like a disappointed father, and then walked away.

Thinking of Raven makes Clarke think of Raven-and-Bellamy, so she says “Well, gotta go check on _my_ room now, great seeing you, later, bye!” and pretty much runs upstairs, completely obvious. Hopefully he’ll think she just really had to pee.

It’s stupid; Bellamy practically lived in the house for all of her freshman year, but there’d always been those days where he didn’t show, or spent the night at his real apartment, and she’d have some time to flush her system. Or he’d spend the night in Raven’s room.

Raven’s room, which is now also Clarke’s room, and just two floors above Bellamy’s. _Jesus_.

Clarke also didn’t actually know she had a crush on Bellamy Blake for most of last year. She didn’t really figure it out until their stupid cat-video text war, which is just. It’s absurd. Who decides they’re in love with someone based on the picture of a cat riding a Roomba? Absolutely nobody, except her.

It would be different, if she only wanted to have fun and make out with him, like Lexa. Or hook up in the shower like she’s pretty sure he and Roma did like all of March. But then she came back after Christmas to find him on the couch in his pajamas, wearing a bright pink Santa hat and eating Lucky Charms with his little sister. And there’s absolutely no acceptable way to push him up against the wall and say “Hey I really want you to eat me out but also raise a family together.”

So instead she unpacks her clothes and helps Raven hang Police tape all over their door like they’re thirteen years old and mad at their parents, and then they head downstairs for the meeting.

Lincoln pulls Clarke aside just outside the front room. Raven gives a raised brow but goes in without her.

“Uh, hey,” Clarke says, giving him a one-armed hug. “Missed you too, pal.”

“I’m sure,” Lincoln gives a small smile. “But actually, I wanted to know if you’d like to run for house president.”

“What?” Clarke says, because, well. She didn’t know she’d been giving off a _house president_ vibe. Also, she’d thought they had to be a senior. “What about Roma?” she asks. “Or Emori, she’s a senior this year.”

Lincoln looks amused. “The house president doesn’t have to be a senior,” he explains. “Just someone willing to put in the work. And Emori is studying in France for this semester, and Roma isn’t interested.”

Clarke’s initial instinct is to say no, but then she stops to consider. The house president doesn’t really do much, except help members that need it. They also run the house budget, but that’s easy enough, like taxes. Mostly, she’ll just have to be prepared for scattered freshmen to knock on her door late at night. “Okay,” she decides. “Sure. You still the work manager?” Lincoln nods.

The actual meeting is pretty short. Lincoln introduces himself and Clarke, and has everyone vote on her as their president, which is pretty silly since half the people in the room don’t even know her, but it’s unanimous anyway. Even Murphy says yes, which is a little surprising. It’s also surprising he’s back in the first place, but Clarke doesn’t question it. He probably didn’t want the hassle of trying to sneak cigarettes in a college dorm.

There are a lot of new faces, since most of the tenants the year before were seniors. A few, like Bellamy and Wick, she recognizes. There’s also a sophomore named Mbege, real name John, who Clarke knows from her gym credit freshman year. She didn’t spend much time around him, but she remembers him being funny.

There are quite a few freshmen, which makes sense; the only way to circumnavigate the school’s rule about freshmen living in dorms is to live in approved housing, like student co-ops, of which there aren’t many for their university. And Sky-Box is the only one willing to take on freshmen, anyway.

Monty and Jasper are clearly childhood best friends, like her and Wells. Fox and Monroe too. There’s a serious looking boy who says his name is Miller, and a tiny girl named Charlotte who admits she’s just sixteen and graduated early. The only other tenant is Dax, a senior with the relaxed smile of someone ready to sit back and do absolutely nothing for the next year.

They do the whole name-year-major thing, and then mill around a little making small talk, which just reminds Clarke of her mother’s God-awful work luncheons. Then there’s the house tour, and signing up for the first week of chores.

“We’re not a substance-free house,” Clarke tells them, “So that means that whatever you bring in with you, you’re in charge of. There are kids under twenty-one here, so keep that in mind.” It’d been something of a hassle, to be honest; Indra and Nyko and the other seniors had the habit of leaving bottles of Smirnoff and Jack Daniel’s lying around, and if the campus police had decided to happen by, Clarke and any of the other minors could have been in trouble.

The alternative was to label themselves as a substance-free house, which meant about twenty pounds’ worth of paperwork, and some fancy sign for their front yard. They’d probably make the student bulletin, as _setting a good example_ , or something equally awful. Plus, both Murphy and Nyko were smokers, so it probably wouldn’t have worked out so well.

She considers asking Lincoln if they should try to register substance-free this year, but Murphy still smokes as far as she knows, and Raven’s pretty attached to being able to drink her tequila beer while working on the first of her eventual robot legion.

Bellamy catches up to her in the hallway, and she’s standing on the third step which puts them at eye-level, because he’s ridiculously tall and she’s ridiculously short. Her first thought is _it’d be really easy to kiss him like this_ , which makes the rest of the conversation pretty much unbearable. Clarke doesn’t do well with crushes; she never has. She usually lets other people do the work—ask her out, confess their feelings, ask for her number, so she just has to say yes and maybe kiss them a little. When she does make the first move, there’s a reason; she’s drunk, or she has a contingency plan. She knew Lexa was a senior, and always planned on moving out of the city once she graduated, so it was easy for Clarke to relax into something fun and comfortable with her. Neither was very serious about it, so neither stood to get hurt.

Bellamy reaches to pull a long yellow cat hair from the sleeve of her sweater, and holds it up with a smirk. “Let me guess; dragon fur?”

“It’s very rare,” Clarke breathes. She hopes he doesn’t notice how strained her voice sounds. “You should hold onto it.” He laughs, and Clarke thinks _I could be serious about you_.

And then she thinks, _this is going to be a terrible year._

The beginning of September is the hottest of the year, which doesn’t even make sense. They don’t have any air conditioners, so they tend to keep all the windows open at all times, hoping a breeze might happen by. The boys walk around shirtless, and eventually the girls decide _fuck modesty_ and walk around shirtless too. Clarke borrows a lot of Raven’s shredded tanks and jean shorts. They drag their mattresses out onto the balcony and sleep on top of the sheets, mostly naked. It’s too hot to really care who might see them. At any given moment of the day, someone’s taking a freezing shower downstairs, so the sound of running water becomes constant background noise.

“Can’t you do something about this?” Wick whines from his spot, face-down on the cool tile of the kitchen floor. “You’re the house president!”

Clarke glances down at him, from where she’s pressed against the fridge door. “What is it you think I should do?”

“I don’t know,” Wick mutters. “Write a letter to your Congressman. Bully the college into giving us each an AC unit. Buy nothing but popsicles.”

“I’m the house president,” Clarke says. “I’m here for vague motivation, and budget spreadsheets. If you want to know how much money we’re spending on cucumbers this week, I can help you.”

But as it turns out, house presidents do a lot more than just offer vague motivation, and make spreadsheets on excel for the budget. Apparently they get a monthly allowance from the school for groceries, and a different budget for utilities. Tenants have to pay for the electricity by themselves, though, which comes out of the rent pool. Clarke discovers very early on that money orders are her best friend, and that the Food Lion down the road both sells them, and is open all night.

“You should probably be better at this,” Raven muses as Clarke scrambles to address the envelope just three minutes before the mailman shows up.

“You voted for me,” Clarke snaps back. Raven gives her an unimpressed look, and Clarke sighs; her roommate’s right, she should be better at this by now. It’s been two months, but Clarke keeps getting side tracked by course work, or Charlotte’s homesickness and nightmares, or the daily texts to her mom letting her know she’s alive, or her midnight talks with Bellamy.

They still spend their early hours drinking coffee at the kitchen table, eating sugary cereal straight from the box. He still walks around mostly shirtless and she’s still embarrassingly into him and sometimes they study but mostly they just talk. She knows she should tell him, mostly because she’s pretty sure that once he’s let her down gently, she’ll be able to move on.

The thing is, she doesn’t really _want_ to move on. She’s told Wells, and his working theory is she’s a masochist, and also dumb. She doesn’t really disagree.

Clarke manages to just get the money order out on time, before slumping into a kitchen chair with a sigh. Bellamy chuckles from across the table—he’s reading an actual, physical newspaper, because he’s ridiculous. He has an actual, antique broadsword in his room; she’s seen it.

“Not easy being in charge, huh?” he teases, and Clarke squints over at him. Over the last year and a half, she’s come to realize that Bellamy is essentially an elderly man, with the libido of a teenager. It’s a strange combination, and one that shouldn’t get her as hot as it does.

“Are you good with budgeting?” she asks. “I feel like that’s something you’d be good at.” Bellamy sets his paper down and levels her with a stare.

“Why would you think that?” he asks, sort of amused and sort of offended. Like he genuinely can’t understand how she managed to see through his lazy-homeless-shameless flirt act. He’s wearing a green sweater, wire-rimmed glasses, and reading a newspaper. Yeah, it’s a mystery.

Clarke rolls her eyes. “I already know you’re a genius,” she points out. “You can stop pretending you’re a dick.”

“I am a dick,” Bellamy says, but he’s smiling and doesn’t really mean it. “Why do you need help budgeting?”

“I don’t, really,” Clarke explains. “I’ve made a spreadsheet, and I don’t overspend or anything, but I always forget to pay bills until the last second.”

“So you need a time manager,” Bellamy shrugs, like it’s obvious. “Or maybe, like, a vice president.”

“Sure,” Clarke shrugs. It’s as good an idea as any. “Want to be my vice president?”

“How do you know I won’t just kill you off, and take the throne for myself?”

“Because then you’d have to do all the work by yourself,” Clarke points out, smugly. Bellamy frowns.

“Fine. Maybe I’ll keep you around. Just to make all the spreadsheets.”

Clarke snorts. “Right, that’s the reason.”

She calls a house meeting—the front room packed with bleary-eyed students, unused to waking up before nine AM and sniffing out for coffee like blind baby cats—and they vote. It’s unanimous, and Clarke tries not to feel jealous that they so obviously like Bellamy more than her. Of course they like Bellamy; he makes the box macaroni shaped like cartoons, and he helps them with their history work, and he lets them sneak beer even when Clarke tells him not to. He gets to be the fun housemate, while Clarke has to be the Mom that reminds them when it’s their turn to clean the bathroom, or wash laundry.

“They only like you because you do all their dishes,” Clarke mutters, poking a straw at the homemade root beer float he’d set down in front of her. it’s in a frosted glass, with some Latin phrase on the front. He used chocolate ice cream for his, and she’s pretty sure actual beer, and there’s chocolate in the corner of his mouth that she wants to lick off.

“Yeah,” he agrees around another spoonful. “Also, I’m just a people person.” Clarks snorts. That may be the biggest lie she’s ever heard; Bellamy Blake is not a _people person_. She’s only ever seen him hang out with Raven, Wick, and (strangely) Murphy in any sort of relaxed way. And her, which she tries really hard to not feel smug about. Mostly, Bellamy just big brothers everyone, or reads some biography in the corner of the room and leaves them all to their human interaction.

Monroe chooses that moment to stumble in, probably for a glass of water or something. It’s around three in the morning, and Clarke knows most people aren’t actually awake. She is, because she just had a late shift at the clinic all the premed students are interning at. Bellamy is, because he’s Bellamy. She’s pretty sure he only sleeps like, once a month, to recharge or something. Like a battery.

“Uh, sorry,” Monroe mutters, squinting at them and clearly confused. “What are you guys doing up?”

Clarke points a spoon at herself. “Premed,” she points it to Bellamy, “Insomniac.” They shrug in tandem.

“Okay,” Monroe drawls, filling a McDonald’s _Star Trek: Into_ _Darkness_ cup, draining it, and then setting it in the sink. “G’night.” Two spoons wave her off.

Clarke watches her leave with a frown. “Should we normalize our sleep schedules?”

“Probably,” Bellamy shrugs cheerfully. “So, you see the new _Avengers_ , yet?”

She meets Octavia—properly meets, with a handshake and everything, it’s only a little awkward—halfway through October. Clarke comes downstairs, somehow lethargic from too much sleep and also exhausted, and almost doesn’t even notice the young brunette perched on the kitchen counter until she’s finished her first cup of coffee.

She looks up to find both Blake’s looking at her, wearing matching looks of amusement. Well, Octavia looks amused. Bellamy’s outright smirking at her, like the asshole he is. Clarke glares. “What?” she demands. “Did Mbege hide Miller’s beanie in the freezer again?”

“ _Mbege_ took it?” Miller asks from the doorway, a little outraged. Clarke frowns; she hadn’t meant to tell him. Mbege likes to take what he considered his housemates’ _iconic props_ , and put them in strange places for others to find. He hid Clarke’s pastels in a jumbo box of Band-Aids, once. He hid Bellamy’s copy of _The Iliad_ , until Bellamy and Murphy had dragged him out to Clarke and Raven’s balcony and threatened to dangle him like some Hollywood mobster, if he didn’t give it back.

“I don’t know,” Clarke says meekly, and Bellamy snorts. Miller stalks over to the freezer and pokes around the frozen vegetables, pulling out his hat with a scoff before storming out.

“Oops,” Octavia chirps. “I’d hate to be that Mbege guy.” Bellamy flicks her hair fondly and turns to Clarke.

“She got suspended,” he explains, “For _putting a cow in the dean’s office_.” He’s staring at his sister with equal amounts pride and exasperation. Octavia just crosses her legs primly and says, “It was a _baby_ cow, and Mr. Shumway deserved it. He wanted to start buying beef from the county slaughterhouse. That place is _awful_ ; they keep the cows all locked up in this warehouse, without even any grass. They’re terrible.” She sounds so fierce as she says it, that Clarke gets a little sucked in despite herself.

“So, you like cows,” she jokes, but Octavia looks at her sternly.

“Cows are awesome,” she declares, leaving no room for argument.

Bellamy grins over to Clarke. “She wanted to be a cowgirl for forever,” he says, “Because she thought they just looked over cows in a big field all day.” Octavia blushes scarlet and swats at his shoulder.

“You wanted to be a cow-sitter,” Clarke grins, “With no endgame?”

Octavia shrugs, trying hard not to seem embarrassed. “Cows are _awesome_.”

“I told her she could stay here,” Bellamy says, glancing at Clarke as if daring her to argue. She nods instead, and tries not to grin when he seems surprised.

“She can bunk with me and Raven, but there isn’t a guest bed.” Bellamy looks thoughtful for a moment before gesturing for them to follow him up the stairs. He stops outside Roma’s single, and knocks. She opens the door after a moment and glares out at them.

“Morning,” Bellamy says happily. “We were just wondering what you did with all those mattresses after the play.”

Roma stares at him, confused. “They’re in storage,” she says. “The theater department has a prop closet.”

“Great,” Bellamy says, and they spend the rest of the morning moving a full-size into the space of floor between Clarke and Raven’s beds.

Octavia fits into Sky-Box seamlessly, which isn’t very surprising, since Bellamy had practically lived there a full year before moving in. The girls all fawn over her, while Jasper and Mbege look a little too interested in her eyes. Clarke has to keep Bellamy distracted so he won’t notice, but it’s not hard. She just has to say things like, _But I thought women in Ancient Rome were just barefoot baby factories_ , or _But_ Percy Jackson _is so much better than the myths themselves_ , and he practically falls over himself to correct her.

Lincoln is the only one completely uninterested in Octavia, and he seems to leave the room whenever she walks in. Clarke wants to call him on it, but it’s also sort of hilarious. He almost tripped walking up the stairs when she appeared on the landing, and he couldn’t get away fast enough.

Octavia waits out the three days of her suspension at the house, and then Bellamy drives her back Wednesday morning. Clarke walks them to the door, and Octavia takes her phone before leaving. She programs her number in, under _The Better Blake_ , and says “Text me,” with a huge smile.

Later that night, she and Bellamy are eating leftover enchiladas, when she gets a snapchat from his sister; she and her roommate at the boarding school have dragged their mattresses out onto the floor, and the caption says _it’s a lifestyle choice_. Clarke shows Bellamy, who laughs and shakes his head.

“Please don’t be friends with my sister,” he groans. “That’s so _weird_.”

“No promises,” Clarke shoots.

Clarke finds out about the still the day of Halloween, when she smells something weird coming from the laundry room-turned-half-bath on the first floor, and goes to investigate.

There are a lot of pipes that look copper, a few metal buckets, and a hotplate on the back of the toilet. Clarke stares dumbly for a moment, not really sure what she’s seeing, until she smells the pool of liquid in the toilet—alcohol. _Strong_ alcohol, that makes her eyes water.

The door opens behind her, and she turns to find Monty and Jasper fidgeting wide-eyed in the entrance. “It’s not what it looks like,” Jasper tries.

“That’s a terrible way to start a sentence,” Clarke says, still a little shocked by the fact that _there’s a moonshine still in the bathroom_. She looks back at the toilet. “You make it in the _toilet_?”

“We sterilized it first,” Monty offers, and Clarke sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“We don’t have time for this,” she says, which is true. Everyone’s busy setting up for the party they’re throwing. They’d been sort of goaded into it, just like last year, and so Clarke and Lincoln had been all set on having another chess-themed bash, but Bellamy had put a stop to that pretty quickly.

“You didn’t mind it last year,” Clarke defended. Bellamy shrugged.

“I didn’t actually live here last year,” he explained. “But fine; let’s take a vote.” They did, and pretty much everyone else agreed with him; chess was out.

“Fine,” Clarke muttered. “But you’re planning it.”

Bellamy smirked. “That’s how you know it’ll be good.” To Clarke’s dismay, it turns out Bellamy Blake knows how to plan a party. He and Wick bought about five hundred pounds of candy, and those little aluminum pouches of wine cooler, that look like lemonade. He’s even come up with a tentative theme; historical, which is just _so_ predictable she busts out laughing when he tells her.

“Clean this all up,” Clarke orders, looking at the boys sternly. She knows they call her Mom behind her back, and she’s hoping to use that to her advantage. “I want it all gone by the time the others arrive.”

Then she goes to collect Bellamy from where he’s moving furniture around in the living room, trying to make space for dancing. She takes him back to the improvised still, and his eyes go so wide Clarke doesn’t feel so bad for staring like an idiot. He touches a copper pipe.

“This is some good craftsmanship,” he decides, and Clarke hits him. “I mean it,” he laughs. “Think we should serve some samples to the guests?”

“We are not giving people toilet liquor,” Clarke says hotly, and flushes it. It doesn’t work, of course; the boys must have cut the line before building their still. Bellamy takes a few pictures of the whole thing with his phone, and then texts Wick to come find them.

Wick brings Raven, who tells Roma and then Murphy, so soon all the tenants of Sky-Box are crammed in the tiny half bathroom, trying to get a look at the still. Mbege takes a ladle and tries the moonshine, gags, and then doubles over.

“’S good,” he gasps out, while Lincoln claps him on the back a little worriedly. At least _someone_ ’s as concerned as Clarke.

By the time the party actually starts, Monty and Jasper have managed to dismantle most of the still, though the toilet still doesn’t flush. “That better not come out of the deposit,” Clarke says darkly, and Bellamy pushes one of the wine cooler pouches into her hand.

“Relax,” he says. He’s predictably dressed as Julius Caesar, with six prop knives glued to his chest, dyed red with corn syrup. “Get footloose. You deserve a little fun,” he grins down at her, and there’s something very surreal about getting life advice from a long-dead Roman emperor.

“So do you,” she agrees, and they toast. He takes a long pull from her beer and eyes her costume, while she pretends not to notice.

“What exactly are you supposed to be?” he asks. She guesses it’s a fair question; Clarke’s wearing a dress she got at a renaissance faire when she and Wells were sixteen. Its sleeves are long, and drape down from her wrists, and the corset bust is a lot tighter now than it was three years ago, but she likes the feel of the material, and it’s not like she has a lot of historical outfits to choose from on short notice.

“A witch, I think,” she shrugs. “Maybe a princess. Something from the Middle Ages.”

“You need a crown,” Bellamy says, tugging at the braid she’s pinned around her head.

“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

She wakes up in her own bed, with Bellamy tucked around her in a blanket of brown skin and freckles. She’s still wearing her dress, and he’s wearing boxers but no blood-stained toga. Clarke glances over to Raven’s bed, but it’s empty. She manages to shut off her brain so it doesn’t overheat, and disentangles herself from Bellamy’s limbs while he mumbles sadly to her sheets. She creeps downstairs, mouth tasting like sand. She checks each couch as she goes, searching for her roommate, and finally peeks into Bellamy’s room in the basement.

Raven’s there, reading some car manual and propped up in Wick’s bed, while he snores with his head in her lap. Clarke gives her a raised brow from the stairs, and Raven glares back.

“Not a fucking word,” she hisses, and Clarke blows her a kiss.

Bellamy finds her in the kitchen half an hour later. He grins crookedly and pours his cereal, and they talk about the new season of _Game of Thrones_ , and stack empty Heineken cans in the recycling bin. He doesn’t mention falling asleep together, and she doesn’t either.

The day before Thanksgiving finds Clarke and Bellamy dangling their legs over the balcony in her room. The kitchen table has been taken over by Fox and Monroe’s art studio project; some sort of sculpture made entirely out of mud. It’s a little gross, and Lincoln made them promise to scrub the room completely once they’ve finished. It reminds Clarke a little of those Aztec houses made out of clay, and makes her hands itch for some charcoal. She’s sketching the city skyline, while Bellamy works on an essay for Russian Lit.

“So when do you head out tomorrow?” he asks, and it takes Clarke a minute to realize he’s speaking to her. She rubs at her cheek absently, which means the skin there is probably stained with black. Bellamy stares at the spot.

“What?” she asks, and his eyes snap back to hers.

“For Thanksgiving,” he explains. Everyone has the next four days off, and last year Clarke flew home for the break to spend time with her mom.

“I’m not,” she shrugs. “Couldn’t afford the plane ticket, and Mom’s working anyway.”

Bellamy frowns. “You only live a few hours away, right?” he asks. “Why not just drive? Raven will probably let you borrow her car.”

Clarke shakes her head. “I don’t drive.” She waits for him to ask why, or how it’s possible that she’s a nineteen year old without a license. She waits for the anxiety that comes with avoiding the questions, avoiding thoughts of her father.

Bellamy shrugs. “I could drive you, if you want.”

Clarke smiles down at the floorboards. “It’s okay, like I said; she’s working. I’d rather hang out here with you guys, anyway.”

“Yeah?” Bellamy asks, and she glances up to find him staring at the spot on her cheek again.

“Yeah,” she nods, and he leans over to wipe at her skin with the pad of his thumb. It comes back black with charcoal, and he wipes it on the thigh of his jeans.

“Cool,” he says, voice shaky, and Clarke _knows_ she isn’t imagining this, the black in his eyes, the way he’s nervously swallowing. She shudders. Bellamy frowns down at her. “You okay?”

Clarke rubs absently at the nape of her neck. She’d fallen asleep cramming in the library the night before, and she’s paying for it now. “My neck’s a little sore,” she shrugs. “I’ll be fine.”

“I can,” Bellamy pauses, considering. “If you want, I could, uh, get the knots out?” He holds up his hands in explanation. Clarke eyes them—she had absolutely no doubts that Bellamy knows how to give a massage. She’s also pretty positive that having his hands on her in any way will be very dangerous. Maybe even painful. She might not be able to keep quiet.

“Sure,” she decides, and turns around so her back is to him. She hears him shuffle forward on his knees, until his thighs are open in a v on either side of her, and he lays his palms on her shoulders, thumbs meeting at the base of her neck.

He’s barely even started when she moans the first time, and he stutters a little before continuing. A few seconds later she moans again, and this time, he stops completely. She’s just about to apologize, when she feels his hand slide slowly around her neck until his fingers are grazing her collarbone, and then his mouth is warm and open at the tip of her spine.

“Uh,” Clarke breathes, and his grip on her tightens.

“Tell me to stop,” he offers, lips brushing her skin as he speaks. Clarke tries to remember how words even work.

“No,” she says, and then his hand is on her pants, thumbing at the button before sliding inside. He presses open-mouthed kisses to her neck and shoulder as she leans back against him.

She breathes heavy when he’s finished, and he’s pulled her into his lap, and is working on his essay again, one hand pressed against her thigh absently. “Okay,” she sighs. “I think you got the knots out.”

He smirks against her hair. Clarke wants to ask what this means, if it might happen again, _how_ she might get it to happen again, if he’d like to spend the night in her bed and she can kick Raven out if necessary, but. She thinks about Raven, and Roma. He’d never dated either of them, she’s pretty sure; just slept with them, or occasionally had shower sex, and then hung out platonically in the kitchen. Maybe this is just something Bellamy does with his friends—quizzes them on Bio notes and then gets them off. Just another perk that comes with the package.

They head back in eventually, have dinner, and sleep in their own beds.

Octavia comes over on Thanksgiving. She gives Clarke a hug almost immediately, which is only kind of awkward because all Clarke can think is _I got fingered by your brother_. Lincoln is at home with his family, so Clarke keeps him updated by taking various pictures of her throughout the day and sending them to him. Weird angles of her cheeks, strands of her hair, a pinky finger in the corner of the frame. Lincoln doesn’t find it as funny.

Raven leaves with Wick early in the morning, to spend the break with his elderly grandmother. “She’s got some serious Alzheimer’s, and thinks I’m her husband,” Wick says cheerfully, “Which is fucking creepy, but also hilarious.”

“That’s right in your wheelhouse,” Clarke tells Raven, who nods sagely.

Bellamy makes a Pixie Pie, which is basically just chocolate pudding and a whole thing of cool whip.

Clarke is stirring the cranberry sauce on the stove when Murphy walks in, cigarette perched between his lips. He walks over and says, “What the fuck you want me doing?” and waits for her answer.

She has him stir the sauce, and wants to ask why he’s helping, but she doesn’t want to chance him leaving. Octavia demands a pumpkin pie, so she and Clarke pick up the canned filling from the twenty-four hour mart two blocks down, and a frozen pie crust because there’s no flour in the house. Clarke does find a can of baked beans, along with Fox’s purple sunglasses, probably stolen by Mbege. She puts the beans in the oven, and the glasses on the front table.

They gorge themselves on pie and turkey and fried onions straight from the can, because none of them actually like green bean casserole. They watch shitty made-for-TV Hallmark movies on Netflix, and Octavia passes out on the couch. Murphy’s slunk away to some other corner of the house by now, so it’s just Clarke and Bellamy, and he follows her into the kitchen, collecting up dirty pie plates along the way.

She puts the dishes in the sink as his arms slide around her stomach, pressing her against the sink. She bites back a grin, because she still might be confused and nervous and a million other things, but she’s also really into the feel of him against her back. “Why are you always behind me?” she teases, and he freezes.

“Is that a hint?” he asks, mouth pressed to the skin below her ear. He takes her by the hips and spins her so they’re face-to-face.

“I wasn’t complaining,” she breathes. He ducks down to kiss her, sucking at her lips. “But this is okay too,” she sighs. He picks her up by her thighs, setting her on the edge of the sink. Her shorts are soaking through with trapped water, but she can’t really care and he’s dragging them down to her ankles, anyway.

“You’re fucking amazing,” he says as he falls to his knees. He presses a kiss to her thigh, and then goes down on her.

“You’re okay,” she says after, and he laughs as he helps her redress.

Octavia goes back to school, and the rest of the tenants come back to Sky-Box. The holiday threw off the momentum of the house, though, and Lincoln almost has an aneurism after the third person forgets to make up their chore hours. Eventually everyone gets back on track, and they make it through most of December, relatively unscarred. At least there aren’t any more stills in the bathrooms. Lincoln makes sure to keep Monty and Jasper’s cleaning duty restricted only to the living and dining rooms.

Clarke almost expects things with Bellamy to go back to how they were, before he spontaneously got her off on the balcony. Instead, he makes her coffee in the morning, and then fucks her in the coat closet. She tests him on Chaucer, and goes down on him under the table. He spends the night wrapped around her, and they have sex in the shower. It’s almost exactly what she wants, except the commitment. And she’s almost convinced she can take it—that she doesn’t have to be greedy, but then Roma gives her a knowing grin as they pass each other in the hall. Bellamy left a hickey on Clarke’s neck, and she _knew_ it was obvious, but. Roma probably knows because he’s given her hickeys before. Maybe in the same spot. Maybe in the same way. Maybe Clarke’s being an idiot.

“Did you know Bellamy and I have been hooking up since Thanksgiving?” Clarke asks Raven. She looks up from her nearly-finished robot (it’s starting to look vaguely human, which freaks Clarke out.) and frowns.

“I thought you’ve been hooking up since Halloween,” she says mildly.

“Do you know if he’s, uh, with anyone else?” Clarke asks, wincing. Raven looks entirely unimpressed.

“Why don’t you just ask him?”

Clarke makes a face. “What, just go up to him and say, _hey so I know we’re just fooling around and it’s completely casual and I have no right to be clingy but are you going down on any girls in the shower?_ Don’t be stupid.”

Raven rolls her eyes. “Me, don’t be stupid, right. He goes down on you in the shower?”

Clarke frowns. “You’re terrible at this.” Raven shrugs and goes back to her robot.

“I don’t do romance,” she explains. “I’m holding out for a robot husband.”

Clarke snorts. “Does Wick know you’re planning to marry Skynet?” Raven pointedly ignores her.

She almost asks him, the night before she flies home for the holidays, but then he gives her this fucking ridiculous smile, and hugs her with one arm. He presses a kiss to her head and says, “Merry Christmas, Clarke. See you next year.”

It’s a stupid joke, and he said it last year too, but her stomach still flips. “Yeah,” she says. “Have a good break.” And then she leaves like a coward. Raven texts her a picture of some frowning cat in a party hat.

Christmas goes as well as expected. She spends most of the days Skyping with Wells, who’s still in Macau through the season, wearing her pajamas like _all the time_ , and watching old Cary Grant movies that her friends think are pretentious. Her mom mostly works, which is fine, but she’s always home for dinner, and she buys Clarke the specialty peppermint coffee creamer, and Clarke drinks so much of it she gets sick.

Christmas day she spends in the hospital, decorating her dad’s room with colored tinsel and popcorn on string, with her mom.

New Year’s, she goes to a party with some kids she went to high school with. She recognizes most of them in a vague sort of way, and they’re all welcoming enough. She tries the eggnog, but it’s made with vodka, which makes her gag. She runs into Lilly on the pool deck, and they spend a few hours catching up, and when the clock strikes midnight, Clarke lets her kiss her. It’s soft, and nice, but.

It’s not Bellamy.

She texts him when she gets home. _Happy New Year! Hope you got a kiss_

_JULIUS: do robots count?_

_Clarke: I’m telling Raven_

_JULIUS: Skynet and I are meant to be. O says hi_

_Clarke: Hi back._ She hesitates; she can easily say goodnight and turn her phone off, or just ask after Raven or Murphy or how his break’s going. Instead she types, _I would have kissed you_

_JULIUS: I’d leave Skynet for u._

_JULIUS: in a fucking heartbeat._

_JULIUS: so what are u wearing?_

He picks her up from the airport, even though Raven was supposed to.

“Where’s Raven?” Clarke asks, once he lets her go again. He laughs.

“Nice to see you too,” he teases. “She had a lecture she couldn’t skip. So you got me instead, sorry.” He picks up her duffel bag and leads her out to the car.

“I guess you’ll do.” She digs around in her carry-on, searching for the wrapped box at the bottom. “I, uh, got you something,” she tosses it awkwardly in his lap once he slides in behind the wheel.

He glances at her, amused. “Do I get three guesses?”

“If you want,” Clarke shrugs. “Or you could just open it and find out.”

“I bet you skip right to the end of books too,” he teases, tearing at the wrapping. It’s shimmery gold with different Santa’s in Hawaiian shirts.

It’s an annotated copy of _The Iliad_ , with Greek and Latin translations. It took Clarke an embarrassing amount of time to find on the internet, and cost a stupid amount of money. But, she’s rich, and she didn’t have much else to do over her break except obsess over things and eat reindeer-shaped sugar cookies, so.

Bellamy’s still staring at it, not speaking, face blank. Clarke clears her throat a little nervously. She’d been so sure he’d like it… “If it’s not the right, um, edition, I guess I could return it?” she tries. She doesn’t really know the differences between book editions, but she feels like she should say something.

Bellamy takes in a breath and lets it out, and then puts the book down softly on the dashboard, and turns to look at her seriously. “I’m going to kiss you,” he says, grave. Clarke blinks and then laughs.

“Okay,” she says, confused. “Thanks for the—” He grabs her face in his hands and kisses her, just like he said he would. It’s deeper and wetter than usual, like he’s been holding back, which. She can’t even imagine what he must be capable of, if he’s been holding back all this time.

“Fuck,” he breathes into her mouth when he pulls back. Just enough that they’re breathing each other’s air, warm and humid, and she’s staring up at him, looking for an explanation, but his eyes are closed. She reaches up to smooth the lines between his eyebrows, and he looks down at her. “I’m so fucking crazy about you,” he says, and Clarke stops breathing.

“Me too,” Clarke says, nodding sharply with his hands still warm on her face. “I’m,” she laughs, disbelieving. The seat belt’s digging into her hip and shoulder, but she barely even notices. “I’m fucking crazy about you too,” she says, and he kisses her again.

“I got you a present too,” he mumbles into the skin of her neck and pulls back, blushing. “I hid it under your pillow, like, I don’t know—the goddamned Tooth Fairy, or something. I had Raven help me pick it out, so it’d be perfect. She made fun of me.”

“So I’m better than Skynet?” Clarke grins. Bellamy wraps his fingers between hers and starts the car.

“ _So_ much better than Skynet,” he agrees.


	3. To Fall Down At Your Door

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back bitches.
> 
> also, yes Kristen, there is a dog. just for you.

Clarke wakes up near the tail-end of February, freezing and alone in her bed. Which wouldn’t be so out of the ordinary, if she and Bellamy hadn’t been sleeping together pretty steadily since she got back. She can’t remember the last time he slept in his own bed—her room has better heating, and Raven’s been sleeping with Wick anyway, so it’s just more efficient for everyone involved. Now, Clarke’s used to waking up in a sea of warmth, of tan freckled skin pressed to hers under the blankets, and Bellamy’s rough morning voice like gravel down her spine.

In Raven’s words, they’ve been _nauseatingly adorable_ , which, yeah, Clarke kind of agrees. They’re pretty great.

But suddenly she’s alone in her bed for the first time in weeks, and _shivering_. She can see her breath, and her teeth are starting to chatter. Her feet have already gone numb. Normally, she sleeps in the thin silky pajamas her mom got her from Bed, Bath and Beyond, but she’s starting to seriously regret that decision.

She finds one of Bellamy’s old _Mattress_ sweatshirts and tugs it on. He’d bought so many, he’d probably single-handedly funded the merch desk. Clarke isn’t even sure _why_ he was so proud of the show, but he inexplicably was. He bought one of those plastic disposable tourist cameras from Walmart, to take a bunch of pictures backstage. She’s not sure if he’s ever had them developed, and now she sort of wants him to. She might snoop through his room later and surprise him with them.

The house is quieter than usual, which makes sense because it’s still early enough in the morning that the sky is a soft shade of lavender, but when Clarke pads into the dining room, she finds everyone curled up in one enormous dog-pile under the table. They’ve moved the chairs off somewhere else to make room, and have apparently dragged in every duvet and old patchwork quilt they could find. Monty’s half-hidden under an enormous body pillow shaped like a Hershey’s chocolate bar. Harper’s wearing ear muffs. None of them seem to be talking, apparently choosing to conserve their strength.

“What’s going on?” she demands, and they all perk up immediately, like baby birds excited to find that their mother’s returned to the nest.

“Our fearless leader has finally arrived!” Jasper chirps, and Miller shushes him, looking stern.

“What did we say, about being chill?”

Jasper sighs. “To achieve the chill, it must be practiced,” he recites, like some mantra that he’s had to repeat until he had it memorized. Clarke blinks at them.

“O-kay,” she decides to set that aside for later. The current ice age the house is in seems more pressing. She has priorities. “Why is the house so cold?”

“Because Wick fucked with the radiator,” Bellamy says, and there’s a crash as the kitchen door falls shut behind him, while he stomps the snow off his boots on the old welcome mat just inside. His cheeks and the tip of his nose are bright pink from the cold, and Clarke walks over without really meaning to, reaching up to try to rub the warmth back into his skin. He grins, wide and sloppy, tugging her in until she shivers.

“Why was Wick fucking with the radiator?”

Bellamy half-shrugs. “You know how he is—always trying to update things and make them better, while actually just making them worse. Raven said they can fix it, but they had to go to Harbor Freight, first.”

Clarke frowns, and he presses cold lips to the crown of her head. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I can get the water back on—I just need a pipe wrench, first.”

He pulls open a kitchen drawer that’s sort of become a catch-all over the last year, each time they’ve all been too lazy to actually figure out where something goes. Clarke’s not really sure what a pipe wrench is doing in with all the extra AA batteries and uncapped highlighters, but she’s not about to question it.

Bellamy shoots a glance over at Miller, currently stuffed in between Monty and Harper, and covered in at least three fleece jackets. “What, you’re not gonna help?”

Miller levels him with a serious stare. “I’m from New Orleans,” he says, like that explains everything. “I am a delicate, southern flower.”

Clarke snorts a little without meaning to, and Miller flips her off.

“Okay,” she decides, snatching up one of Mbege’s giant quilts while he’s too weak to defend himself. His mom sends them to him in the mail. “Let’s go.”

Bellamy eyes her a little skeptically, which is probably fair; she’s wearing a pair of thin silky pajamas, his old sweatshirt, and a giant quilt wrapped around her like a swaddle. She’s not sure she’ll fit through the door.

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.” She stuffs her feet in Fox’s pair of furry white boots, bottoms stained yellow from mud. “Fox, I’m wearing your boots,” she calls out.

“Don’t die,” Fox calls back from where she’s buried under blankets and housemates alike.

“We’ll try not to,” Clarke promises, and follows Bellamy out into the backyard.

For all that Clarke’s lived at Sky-Box for the last year and a half, she hasn’t actually been in the backyard very much. Or the front yard, for that matter. Mostly she just consigns herself to the indoor aspects of the house, because that’s who she is as a person.

Now, she can see that they have a well—she’d _known_ they had a well, obviously, and had glimpsed it once or twice through the window, but it’s different, studying it up close. It’s the kind that looks like a miniature how all its own, with a little roof that slides off so they can pick around at its insides. Mostly, it’s just a web of plastic PVC piping, with duct tape wound around the joints every few feet, so old the edges are starting to curl back with age. Bellamy hops down into the hole like he’s done it a hundred times. He starts doing something with the wrench, that looks important, and Clarke pokes at a hollow cicada shell that’s stuck to the edge of the well’s wall.

“The pump froze overnight,” Bellamy explains. “I have to relieve some of the pressure, so the water won’t expand and crack the pump. Then we’ll warm the pipes up.” They have radiant heating, so even with the radiator off, if they get the water running again at least the floors will be warm.

Clarke nods and moves so that she’s crouching just above the ground, blanket bundled up so it doesn’t drag in the snow. “Where’d you learn how to do this?”

Bellamy shrugs as he finishes whatever he was doing with the pipe, and hauls himself out again. “I took on a bunch of odd jobs through high school. Working on a construction site was one of them.”

He tugs her up with one hand, and they walk back towards the house, where he immediately turns on the faucet even though no water comes out. “Just trust me,” he says, and then badgers Murphy for his blow drier.

“I know you have one,” he says, mild. “There’s no point in denying it. I just don’t want to go into your bedroom and risk running into any hazardous waste.”

Murphy grumbles a bit but ultimately the threat of Bellamy rifling through his stuff is enough to send him upstairs, looking like a very disgruntled walking blanket.

Clarke roots around through the storage cupboards for an extension cord that’s long enough, so by the time Murphy comes back with a travel-sized midnight blue hair drier, they’re ready.

Bellamy heats the pipes for fifteen minutes, spreading the heat evenly. “Can you go check if the water’s on?”

Clarke nods, and shouts over her shoulder, “IS THE WATER ON?” When she turns back, Bellamy’s looking up at her, unimpressed.

“I could have done that.”

“Yeah,” Clarke shrugs. “I wasn’t gonna mention it.”

There’s the sound of a window opening, and then Jasper’s voice, calling “NO—WAIT, WAIT.” There’s a pause and then, “YEAH, NO, SORRY. JUST SOME WEIRD GURGLING, LIKE THE SINK’S TRYING TO BURP.”

Bellamy switches the drier onto high for another ten minutes. “HOW ABOUT NOW?”

“N—YES! YES, IT’S ON! YOU GUYS DID IT, OH MY—” the window slides shut again with a muffled _bang_ , which Clarke assumes means Miller has dragged Jasper back and is lecturing him about being chill, again.

Bellamy shakes his head, and Clarke helps him heave the well’s roof back into place. “Jesus Christ.”

“You’re his _hero_ ,” she teases, but she lets him throw his arm around her as they walk. They’re barely back inside, before they hear the front door open, Raven and Wick bickering as they march down the hall.

“All I’m saying is, if it’s fine on its own, don’t try to fix it,” Raven snaps, tossing down some canvas bags filled with a bunch of metal pieces Clarke doesn’t know the names for.

“Why should it be left alone if it can be _better_?” Wells demands. “I was just trying to _help_ it—”

Raven rifled angrily through one of the bags, wrenching out some sort of tool that Clarke’s pretty sure was a prop in the movie _Saw_. “Well maybe it didn’t want your help, did you ever think about that? Maybe it was just fine, being just one radiator, and it was happy with itself.”

“Of course I thought about that!” Wick shouts, following her down the stairs into the basement, where the boiler sits in one of the storage closets Clarke consistently forgets about. Mostly it’s just filled with extra chairs and some old Christmas decorations that have been there longer than she has.

“Why do I get the feeling they’re not just talking about the radiator?” Bellamy muses, and Clarke shrugs. She’ll ask Raven about it later—when Wick isn’t around, and there aren’t as many sharp tools that Raven can swing around in anger.

Monroe starts to make the little microwavable packets of hot chocolate, the kind with the dehydrated marshmallows, because she stress-drinks hot beverages when she sees people argue. And Bellamy starts making some on the stove with the baker’s chocolate that he hoards like a weird culinary dragon, for special occasions like these.

Wick’s the first to poke his head out of the basement. They can still hear metal-on-metal, and Raven swearing, so Clarke assumes it’s going well.

“Okay, so good news is, we’ll have the boiler back on in a couple of hours.”

“What’s the bad news?” Mbege asks, stealing some extra marshmallows from Monty’s mug while he isn’t looking.

Wick frowns. “Who said there was bad news?”

“You insinuated it, by saying _good news_ ,” Clarke explains, filching some of Bellamy’s stovetop hot chocolate, because she’s classy.

“Oh, well, there is no bad news. Unless you count having to wait for a few hours, but I have a solution for that!” Without another word, he marches out the front door, returning a moment later with a pile of bricks in his hand.

“Where did you even _get_ those?” Bellamy frowns. They’re covered in mud and snow and a little bit of whatever grass was hiding underneath, and Clarke knows he’ll probably have stress dreams about stains in the carpet for weeks.

“I have my ways,” Wick says, waggling his eyebrows, as he lines the four bricks up to shape a square. He then goes and fetches a plant pot—Clarke isn’t sure from where, since no one in the house gardens—and pulls four tea lights from the pocket of his New York Giants hoody.

“Wick, did you take up witchcraft without telling us?” Jasper muses, and then his eyes go comically wide. “Oh my god, please say yes—you can be Wick, the Wiccan!”

Wick rolls his eyes as he lights the tea lights one by one, placing them inside the bot. “Even better, Jordan; I’m a scientist.”

From the basement, they can hear Raven scoff.

Wick grimaces, but says nothing. Within moments, the room grows warmer, almost as if the radiator had never been turned off at all. Immediately, they all begin shedding blankets, like birds moulting in the fall.

Bellamy starts collecting them just as quickly, because clutter makes his teeth hurt.

True to Wick’s word, he and Raven do get the boiler fixed before dinner, and Miller makes everyone breakfast burritos to celebrate, because breakfast is the only meal he can cook.

Clarke finds Raven in their room, which is already a bad sign. Or good, depending. She’s withholding judgment until she knows what exactly is going on.

She’s tinkering on one of her robots, which she must have carried up from the basement. And when Clarke glances around, she sees the rest of her things too—clothes and textbooks and gym bags and oil strainers she’d left in Wick’s room for convenience, all tossed in little piles like she didn’t exactly know where to put them.

“Hey,” Clarke moves to sit beside her. It’s a Sunday, so she hasn’t bothered changing out of her pajamas, and Raven’s still covered in ancient boiler grease. She’s pretty much always covered in some type of grease, and she always manages to make it look like high fashion.

“Sorry I’m fucking up your guys’s eternal slumber party,” Raven grumbles, but underneath the sarcasm she sounds like she actually means it.

“Don’t worry, we can just have lots of shower sex to make up for it,” Clarke says, patting her on the arm. Raven snorts, which is better than nothing, at least. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Raven lifts one shoulder higher than the other, possibly in the shittiest attempt of a shrug, ever. “Nothing to talk about. Wick wants a relationship, I don’t, end of story.”

“Do you want to talk about why you don’t want a relationship?” Clarke tries, clearly struggling. Psychology has always been more Wells’s thing, or even Bellamy’s. She only took Psyche 101 to because she needed to fill a science credit, and it seemed easier than Physics.

“Why do I need a reason to not want a relationship?” Raven counters, and that seems fair, so Clarke lets it go. Raven doesn’t. “He thinks there’s someone else, or that I’m still fucked up about Finn, but there isn’t, and I’m not. I just—Finn and I dated for almost half of my life, did you know that? We started going out when we were _twelve_. My only relationship lasted for nine years; I feel like I’m due for some me-time.”

Clarke leaned over so she could rest her head on Raven’s shoulder. “Yeah,” she agrees. “You are.” She wonders what it must have been like, to spend so much of her life on someone, who so easily threw it away. She can understand wanting to take time, to build herself back up again. “Maybe he’ll wait.”

“I don’t want him to wait,” Raven says, tone fierce but voice quiet. Private, like she’s had this talk before. She probably has. “He’s already been waiting, and he’s getting impatient, and I don’t want the pressure of some due date. I might never want to date again, and that’s fine. That’s _my_ decision to make. He wants something I can’t give him, so he should go find it somewhere else.”

“Well,” Clarke shifts, so she can sling an arm around Raven in some sort of half-hug. “You’ll always have Skynet.”

“Yeah,” Raven grins, letting her head roll against Clarke’s cheek. Her hair still smells like engine oil, but Clarke’s used to it. “Boys. Who needs em?”

The kids find the dog in April, and Clarke almost doesn’t notice it at first, because it’s six AM on a Saturday and she hasn’t had her coffee yet, when she shambles into the kitchen to find half of her housemates already up. That in itself is already fairly unusual, but even more unusual is the fact that they’re all congregated in the corner, by the enormous wash basin built in beside the laundry machines.

“Is there some eight o’clock lecture I don’t know about?” she guesses, and Monty looks like he’s about to say something, when instead there’s a bark.

Clarke blinks at them, and they blink back. There’s a second bark, a little quieter than the first, like someone’s trying to muffle it. Clarke’s eyes narrow.

“You all _do_ know that this is a pet-free house, right?”

“Yeah,” Miller says, but he sounds a bit off. After a year and a half of playing poker with him, Clarke can reasonably say Miller is the worst liar she has ever met, because he has some sort of guilt complex or something, and always ends up cracking. “Of course.”

“So would you like to explain to me why there is a dog in our mop sink?”

Jasper opens his mouth, probably to let loose some ridiculous lie based on a Cartoon Network show from the nineties, but Miller beats him to it.

“It’s my fault,” he sighs, stepping back so she can see the lump of soapy fur sitting in the basin. It’s the size of a Jack Russell Terrier, and mangy, with the little furry beard some dogs grow on their chins. “He just followed me home after my jog. I don’t really know why.”

“What I don’t understand is why you brought him in here,” Clarke says, forcing her voice to stay even. It is a _very_ cute dog, and it looks like they started using the soap to make little mohawks out of his hair, and she’s not _heartless_.

But she is the president of the house, and it is still technically school housing. And the lease was _very_ clear: no pets, no exceptions.

“We can’t just kick him out,” Jasper says, scandalized. “It’s _cold_!”

Clarke frowns. The fact is, it _is_ cold. There’s still snow stubbornly sticking to the ground, and the wind is so bitter her eyes water while just checking the mailbox. And that dog does not have very much fur on his bones; honestly, if he’s a stray, she’s amazed that he’s survived this long at all.

“We’ll make posters,” she decides. “He can stay for tonight, but tomorrow, we have to take him to the shelter.” Jasper goes to argue, but Clarke just holds up a hand. “I don’t make the rules, guys, and if campus police comes by, or one of the neighbors calls them, we’d all be in serious trouble. So, one night, and then if no one calls, the shelter.”

She gives one last sorry look at the coffee maker, before heading upstairs to wake the rest of the house for an impromptu meeting. They meet up in the dining room, bleary eyed and different shades of mildly annoyed.

They can’t actually _sit_ at the table, because Harper and Fox’s semester Studio project is an enormous 10,000 piece puzzle. She’s not sure what the picture is supposed to be, or if it’s supposed to be anything at all. It might just be expressionism, or a metaphor or something. She’s not convinced one of the blurry figures doesn’t have two heads. They mostly work on it while getting drunk on bottles of raspberry Smirnoff, so anything’s possible. Also, she’s noticed that if one of the pieces doesn’t fit, the girls have taken to just cutting at it with scissors until it does, which she can’t really hold against them.

“What’s going on?” Bellamy asks, hiding a yawn with his fist. Clarke knows he worked a late shift at the help desk last night, and she feels a little guilty when she sees the bruising under his eyes.

“Elmo,” Miller says, walking in, dog trotting along at his side, freshly washed but still pretty scruffy. The room becomes chaos immediately.

Everyone is cooing over the dog, talking over each other, asking about him, where he’s from, whose he is, can they keep him, until finally Clarke just blows the tinny rape whistle she got from that year’s orientation.

“The dog is not ours, and he’s not staying,” she says, firm. “The house still belongs to the school, and they have a no-pets policy. So don’t get attached.”

“Easy for you to say,” Mbege mutters, and Bellamy whirls on him before Clarke can blink.

“What was that?”

“Bellamy,” Clarke tugs on his arm until he stops glaring. “Guys, I get it. He’s a cute dog. But rules are rules, and we can’t keep him, I’m sorry.”

Lincoln nods a little, even though every time he glances at Elmo, the dog’s tail starts thumping on the floor.

“I can’t believe I got out of bed for this shit,” Raven grumbles, already headed upstairs, while the rest of them slowly start crowding around the dog again.

“Bellamy?” Monroe asks, glancing up from where she’s knelt down beside Charlotte, patting the dog’s silky ears. “What do you think?”

It’s a little frustrating, how they always ask Bellamy his opinion on a matter, like they’re hoping he’ll disagree with Clarke. And sometimes he does, and that’s even worse, but usually he’s on her side.

“Clarke’s right,” he says, and she feels a surge of affection for him. Bellamy _loves_ dogs, she knows, even if she’s personally more of a cat person. “Rules are rules. Sorry, guys. Say your goodbyes by the end of the day.”

He drops a sleepy kiss on her head before heading back up to pass out in her bed. She secretly loves that that’s his reflex, now—he automatically sleeps in her room, like it’s instinct.

Clarke sighs, turning back to the crowd of cooing freshmen—and juniors, in Mbege, Wick and Miller—are curled over the dog.

“He needs a leash,” she muses, and she doesn’t actually think anyone hears her, until Murphy speaks up beside her. She hadn’t even known he was there.

“I have one,” he says, and then takes off down the hall to go fetch it. He’s wearing a black muscle shirt that looks like it’s been put through a shredder, showing off a lot more of Murphy’s pale skin then Clarke had ever wanted to see.

He comes back with a long, leather leash and a matching leather collar, and Clarke really doesn’t want to know what they were originally for. Lincoln steps up, holding out one of her enormous specialty mugs, filled with steaming hot coffee. Bellamy didn’t make it, so it’s not exactly perfect, and she can tell Lincoln used some of his special soy milk instead of whole, like she likes, but. It’s caffeine, and she’s grateful, sipping carefully as they watch Murphy and Miller leash up the dog.

“How does he just happen to have _everything_?” she wonders, and Lincoln hums, considering. “He’s like a weird, fucked up boy scout or something.”

In the end, it’s Jasper who tells Octavia about the dog, but Clarke still isn’t sure how the teenager _got_ to the house, just that she’s there by lunchtime.

“Oh my god,” she declares, sounding fiercer than usual as she cradles Elmo to her chest, letting him lick slobbery stripes up her cheek. “He’s an angel, Bell!”

Across from her, Bellamy runs a hand down his face, skewing his glasses because he didn’t feel like putting in contacts. Jasper’s still behind Octavia, clearly not convinced that Bellamy won’t kill him.

“O, what are you doing here?”

“Jasper said you and Clarke were giving him to the shelter,” she says, like that’s a good enough explanation. “Bell, you can’t! They have a ninety-five percent euthanasia rate!”

Clarke glances up at that, eyes wide. She knows the statistics, in a general sort of way, knows that more often than not, the animals don’t get adopted and have to be put down. But she didn’t know it was so _high_. “Is that true?” She glances over at Fox, who’s already pulling up links on her phone, before passing it over.

“Particularly in this area,” she adds, as Clarke scrolls through the data, glancing over at the dog every few seconds, trying not to feel so guilty. It’s not like there’s much else she can actually _do_ —he can’t stay at the co-op. Miller, Monty and Mbege are out putting up posters, but since Elmo had no collar and was so dirty, they’re not holding out much hope that he’s some family’s beloved pet. They managed to feed him some of Harper’s tuna salad before Octavia showed up and refused to put him back down.

“Do any of you know someone who wants a dog?” Clarke asks.

Three heads shake, but Bellamy’s starting to look a little thoughtful. “What about Roma?”

Roma moved out around Christmas, to an apartment with a girl from her acting class, Gena, who she may or may not also be dating; it’s always hard to tell, with Roma. They’re both in a seasonal show of _Le Mis_ at the local theater downtown, and wanted to live closer to their work.

Also, they may be dating.

“Does she like dogs?” Clarke wonders, sifting through her memories with Roma. She has quite a few, all good ones, but they’d never really talked about much other than school, and sex, and that time Roma taught her to make pudding shots with frozen cool whip.

“I have no idea,” Bellamy shrugs. “But everyone else I know either lives in student housing, or would be a shitty pet owner.”

Clarke nods, because he’s probably right. “Try her, then. I’ll dog-sit.”

“Me too,” Octavia declares, and Clarke’s starting to worry they might have to physically remove Elmo from her arms.

Jasper starts to agree, but Bellamy levels him with a stern glare. “You’re coming. You too,” he nods to Fox. “We can take some more posters and pass them out while we’re downtown.” He leaves Clarke with a perfunctory kiss, a mindless habit by now that still makes her a little giddy.

Octavia eyes her a little, which would be unnerving if Clarke hadn’t spent a good portion of Spring Break with her, watching sitcoms and eating dry cereal in their pajamas. Honestly, if Jasper hadn’t told her about the dog, Clarke probably would have.

“Are you and my brother going to break up in the summer?” she asks, blurting it out like she didn’t really mean to, and Clarke stares at her, taken aback.

“What? No—why? Did he say something?” Clarke tries to remember if Bellamy had given any hints, but she can’t think of any.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t there, just that she might not have noticed. Had he been distant lately? Maybe a little, but she thought that was mostly because of work. When they are together, he still tugs her in against his side, still plays with her hair while he studies, still holds her hand in his _everywhere_ they go, like he can’t get enough of touching her.

“No,” O says immediately, almost desperate. “Oh, no way. He’s crazy about you. I was just worried _you_ —I know you’re going home for summer and Bell has to stay here because of me, but—”

“Octavia,” Clarke smiles a little, because she can’t really help it. She slides down to the floor, so she can wrap an arm around the girl’s shoulders. O’s not actually that much younger than her, just two years, but it makes a difference. “I’m not going to break up with your brother. At least, not yet.” She waggles her eyebrows so she’ll know she’s kidding, and Octavia rolls her eyes, pressing her face in Elmo’s fur.

“He _really_ likes you,” Octavia says, serious, studying Clarke’s reaction.

She swallows, even though it’s hard. “I really like him too.”

“Good.” She sets Elmo down with a sigh. “I have to go to the bathroom. _Don’t_ give him away while I’m gone.” She glares at Clarke suspiciously, like she actually doesn’t trust her to not toss him out the door once her back’s turned. Clarke tires very hard not to feel offended.

Octavia leaves, and Clarke glances down to find Elmo staring up at her, head cocked and curious, eyes looking entirely too hopeful for her to feel comfortable. He catches her eye, and whines.

“No,” she says, firm, the way she’s seen Cesar Milan do it on TLC. “No way. I’m a harder sell, buddy.”

Elmo whines again, a little deeper, and then promptly lays his head in her lap. He keeps staring up at her, weird dog eyebrows hitched up so he can see her.

“No,” she says again, and his tail gives three heavy thumps against the floor. She jiggles her thigh, trying to dislodge him, but he only scuttles closer on his stomach, nosing at her shirt.

“Fine,” Clarke sighs, grumbly, and reaches out to pat his ears. They’re always the softest part, and her favorite, and he snuffles a little as she strokes them, which she’s pretty sure is meant to be a _thanks_.

“You are cute,” she admits, grudgingly, and his tail hammers against the floor again as she moves to rub his neck. “If it weren’t for the school board, I’d let them keep you,” she assures him, just so he won’t get some sort of abandonment complex or something.

By the time she notices Octavia’s leaning against the doorway, watching smugly, Elmo’s rolled over on his back and Clarke is giving him a full-on belly rub, telling him what a good boy he is, and just generally disappointing Cesar Milan in every way.

“I was just…” she trails off as the door opens, and Bellamy marches in, looking incredibly proud of himself.

Clarke hates that it makes her heart sink.

“Apparently Gena’s been wanting a dog for a while,” he announces, sounding happy about it because they _should_ be happy about it; Elmo’s going to a good home, and they’re not getting in trouble. “Roma’s going to surprise her with him.”

“Is that really a good idea?” Clarke asks, before she can stop herself, and the others look down at her, confused. She’s still crouching over the dog, with both hands deep in the fur of his stomach. “I just mean—what if Roma misread her, or something, and Gena doesn’t actually want him? And then they hand him over to the pound anyway. Pets are seriously the worst gift ever.”

Miller looks almost insulted. “Elmo would be a great gift,” he says hotly. “Anyone would be lucky to have him.”

“I know,” Clarke agrees. “I just meant—”

“Clarke,” Bellamy cuts her off. “Can I talk to you upstairs?” He turns without waiting for her response, and she follows him miserably up to her room.

Raven is still holed up on their balcony, tinkering with what looks like a giant pocket watch, but might in fact be some kind of bomb. She’s been really into pyrotechnics, lately. It’s honestly only a matter of time before the house catches on fire. Clarke isn’t looking forward to it. She’s taken to stashing a fire extinguisher in every room.

“Clarke,” Bellamy says, once they’re inside. “What is this about?”

She could lie. He might even believe her; she’s a way better liar than Miller. She’s got a pretty decent poker face.

But what would be the point? Bellamy will understand, and he certainly won’t _laugh_ at her, and anyway she knows she’s being stupid, and he’s the only one who can straighten out her thoughts.

“I just—he needs us, right?” she asks, not really sure how else to start the conversation. “I mean, he basically just fell into our laps, needing a place to stay and our help, but we’re just going to get rid of him? What kind of message does that send?”

“The kind that says we don’t want to lose our scholarships and housing license,” he says, pragmatic as usual, and Clarke sighs.

“Clarke, you know it’s okay if you like the dog, right?” He reaches over to tug her into a hug, and Clarke stands up on her toes so she can fit her face against his neck, breathing him in. Bellamy always gives the best hugs—full-body, and _warm_ , with both arms wrapped around her.

“He’s a cute dog,” she whispers, and he laughs, presses a kiss to her hair.

“He is a cute dog,” he agrees. “And he does need a home, you’re right. But we can’t give him that. What we can give him, is another home, where he’ll be loved and taken care of. We’re not getting rid of him, we’re sending him home.”

“How are you so good at this?” she grumbles, and he pulls back with a grin.

“Good at what?”

“Your _speeches_ ,” she makes a face. “You always turn everything around with them.”

“Practice,” he shrugs, tugging her back towards the stairs. “I like to hear myself talk.”

They send Elmo off with Roma that night, after dinner. Monroe cries, which isn’t too strange, since Monroe will cry over anything. She cried over the cockroach Mbege killed in the kitchen two weeks ago, and she buried it out in the yard in an empty matchbox. Octavia doesn’t cry, but she does threaten Roma with bodily harm if anything happened to Elmo.

“Wow,” Clarke whispered, watching as Bellamy tried to make his sister apologize. “She’s exactly your type, huh?” She nudged Lincoln in the side with her elbow, but he didn’t seem to find the joke funny, and disappeared for the rest of the night.

She collapses onto Bellamy in bed, making him groan when she flops on his stomach. He tugs her up, rolling over to fit them together. He pulls her hair back, so his mouth can reach the skin of her neck without problem.

“Still sad?” he asks, quiet, and Clarke hums a little.

“Not really.” She reaches down to where his hand is cupping her breast, and traces his fingers, catching them in her own.

She can feel the curl of his lips when he grins, smug. “It was the speech.” He lets his hand drift lazily down her stomach, slipping in between her thighs so she moans, rolling back against him, trying to break his control.

“Yeah, well,” she sighs as he touches her slowly, stroking and fucking her with his hand. “Maybe you’re not the only one who likes to hear you talk.”

There’s a rumbling sound from his chest that vibrates down her spine until her toes curl, and Clarke bucks up against his palm. “Is that a request?”

She tips her head back to look at him, all shadows and white teeth in the dark. “Maybe.”

He kisses her, made messy by the angle, and then slides his lips against her ear as she grinds against him. “ _Alright, princess_ ,” he grins when she shudders. “ _I’ve got another speech for you…_ ”

The annual National Co-op Conference happens in the middle of May, because it’s after Spring Break, but before most of the summer heat waves. Last year it was in October, hosted by a campus in New Orleans, but Clarke didn’t go because she wasn’t the house president. This year, it’s being held in Albany, just a few hours away, and she’s expected to attend.

“But if I go, who’s going to watch the kids?” she asks, when Lincoln tells her. He seems less than impressed.

“You have to go to the conference, Clarke,” he says, gently. “You’re the house president.”

“But why can’t I just send Bellamy instead? He’s my vice president. He can be like my envoy.”

“Bellamy can hear you,” Bellamy reminds them, from where he’s curled up in Clarke’s bed with his book. Clarke glances over and watches him frown down at the page, glasses sliding steadily down his nose because he refuses to get them tightened, sweater thick and warm-looking, hair positively a mess.

The conference conversation is pretty horrible in its own right, but even more so because it means she can’t walk over and straddle his face until it’s over.

“Fine,” Clarke decides, but she heaves an extra big sigh, so Lincoln will know she’s making an enormous sacrifice, because she’s a good person. “But Bellamy’s coming too,” she adds, and can practically _hear_ her boyfriend smirk from across the room.

“Deal,” Lincoln agrees, and then leaves, pulling the door shut behind him because he’s one of the good ones.

Clarke sighs again, and shuffles over to Bellamy. He makes a show of ignoring her, until she starts to crawl into his lap, and then he tosses his book on the nightstand, trading it in for a grip on her hips.

“You’re totally going to use me as arm candy,” he accuses, but he sounds pretty smug about it, leaning up to press a kiss to her skin, where the pendant lays. He really had put it under her pillow, in a tiny little box just like the tooth fairy. It’s silver and a little heavy on her neck, but she likes the weight, the simplicity; just a little anatomical heart made of plain metal. She loved it the second she saw it, and she’s never taking it off.

“You’ll make the best trophy boyfriend,” she agrees. He hums, running his hands up the back of her shirt, tracing the skin over her spine.

It didn’t take them long to realize that _relationship_ sex was actually a whole lot better than _we’re just friends but we have a lot of feelings_ sex. Before, Bellamy had been hard, and a little desperate, giving short sloppy kisses that she _liked_ —she liked everything he gave her. But _now_ , he goes slow, leaving marks down her stomach and on the inside of her thighs, giving long languid, wet kisses that made her toes curl—and Clarke liked them, more.

“Bell, seriously, thanks for doing this,” Clarke says, voice hitching a little each time he finds a new patch of skin to lick. “I—ah—really appreciate it. Mm.” She leans back so he can tug her shirt off, tossing it across the room. She probably won’t find it for weeks, and that’s if the robots don’t get it first. She doesn’t actually care all that much.

“No problem,” he mumbles into the space between her breasts, pressing his mouth against her bra, soaking the material through with his tongue.

“Okay but—really, I don’t think I—oh, uh. I couldn’t do it without you.” She cuts herself off with a moan when he slides his hand down to grind his palm between her thighs.

“Clarke?” His breath is wet against her neck.

“Y-yeah?”

He pulls away so she can see him—glasses lost to parts unknown, mouth wet and eyebrow raised, hair ruined from her hands. She hadn’t even realized she was pulling it. “Stop talking.”

Clarke frowns, dips her fingers down his stomach so his muscles jerk under her touch. He should know better, than to make it a challenge. She’s a sore loser. “Make me.”

He does.

Clarke really doesn’t _mean_ to forget about the Nation Co-op Convention—she just has a lot going on that month. Charlotte’s nightmares are back and worse than ever, which means nobody gets much sleep and everyone’s a little crankier than usual. It also means they start forgetting about their chore hours, which nearly gives Lincoln an aneurism, and raises Bellamy’s blood pressure each time the sink fills up with dirty dishes. Apparently he has a phobia of mold, which Clarke would think was adorable if she wasn’t already sleep-deprived and annoyed. Everyone expects her to just be able to _fix_ things that go wrong in the house, never mind that she has no real idea _how_.

Add to the mix the fact that finals are coming up, which automatically sends everyone into a tailspin of anxiety and last-minute studying, and Clarke’s feeling pretty drained. She walked in on Mbege pouring coffee over his cereal the other day with a blank look on his face, but when she pointed it out to him, he just shrugged and said, miserably, “It’s all arbitrary, anyway. Everything is meaningless.” And then he just poured the whole thing down his throat, even though the coffee was still steaming. He didn’t even flinch.

So when she wakes up to Jasper blowing one of those enormous air horns that gym coaches use—which, where did he even _get_ one of those, anyway? Clarke’s like ninety percent sure he’s never even been to a gym before—she’s not exactly sure what’s going on.

Then Lincoln walks in, dressed perfectly for the weather and already packed, looking more disappointed in her then ever. Behind her, still sprawled out in her bed, Bellamy lets out a yawn too big for his body.

“Oh,” Clarke sighs, but Lincoln is clearly too disappointed for words, instead giving her his sternest look before walking out again. She shuffles over and turns on the light, because it’s still before dawn and she has to see what she’s packing.

She’s just barely flipped the switch, before one of Raven’s heavy-duty travel pillows hits her in the side of the head. Raven collects them in all different colors, the kind with the little metal beads inside, which makes them sturdy, and _heavy_. Heavy enough to hurt.

“What the fuck, Raven?”

“Turn that fucking light the fuck _off_ ,” Raven grouses, flopping back on her stomach so she can bury her face in the mattress. Clarke frowns over at her even though she can’t see.

“I have to see what I’m doing! I’ll turn it off when I leave.”

Raven mumbles something into her blankets, probably some sort of ancient threat in Spanish or something, from the Mexican Civil War. She likes to whip them out at dinner parties, or in the middle of conversations with people that she hates. It’s one of her biggest talents, and Clarke’s pretty sure she’s even listed it on her resume under Special Skills— _can easily threaten any non-Spanish speaker with unspeakable things, at the drop of a hat._

To be fair, it is kind of impressive.

“Hey,” Clarke nudges the lump of Raven with her foot, as Bellamy roots around in her closet, tossing clothes haphazardly into a duffel bag. She hopes he grabs enough bras. “You’re in charge while I’m gone. Don’t let them blow anything up.”

“Yeah, we both know I’d be the one blowing things up, babe,” Raven says muzzily, and Clarke kicks her again.

“I’m serious. I better not come home and find another still in the bathroom.”

“I’ll make them put it in the garage, this time.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Clarke sighs, leaning over to smack a wet kiss to her cheek, so Raven groans and scowls at the slobber. “Love you!”

“Have fun doing presidential shit,” Raven calls. “And having hotel sex with your boyfriend.”

“We will,” Bellamy promises with a grin, and Raven tosses another pillow right as they close the door.

Lincoln is waiting outside at the car, with two tumblers filled with coffee, and another resting on the hood filled with what Clarke assumes is hot cider, since Lincoln does not drink caffeine. He’s been going through a slow-food phase, which basically means there is an endless supply of kale in their fridge at all time, and some very expensive type of ground beef that didn’t come from a cow.

“Ready?” he asks, pointed, as he slides in behind the wheel. Clarke shrugs and slips into the backseat, giving Bellamy shotgun since he’s the only other driver.

“Let’s go.” She makes them take a selfie with her first, since she promised Octavia a ton of embarrassing on-the-road pictures of Bellamy, and right now he’s still scruffy from sleep, wearing the glasses that he hates, and his hair’s doing a weird cowlick thing that she really needs to document.

Lincoln’s road trip soundtrack consists mostly of that _I Would Walk 500 Miles_ song, while Bellamy’s is more along the lines of Pearl Jam and pre-Nirvana Kurt Cobain, before he decides to switch so the audiobook for _Henry IV **.**_ By the end of the first hour, Clarke is craving some of Monty’s all-girl k-pop, or really just _anything_ else. She’d take Wells’s classical cello music, she’s that desperate.

Bellamy pulls into the campus parking just after lunch, which was gas station egg salad, since they’re three college students on a road trip and a strict budget, and Clarke’s not about to use the emergency credit card on Applebee’s, thank you very much.

Clarke peels herself from the backseat with a grimace. The drive only took a little over four hours, but she still feels rumpled and lethargic, and wishes she was the kind of person who can sleep in a car.

The Convention itself is being held in the Atmospheric and Environmental Studies building on campus, which means they pass by a lot of terrariums. Clarke’s pretty sure one of them is filled with some weird poisonous fish, but she doesn’t get a good look at it. It could just be a weird poisonous fern, or something. Biology is weird.

Most of the other co-op students are already there, because they had farther to travel and headed out sooner. There’s some sort of brunch buffet on a long table across the room, with a punch bowl that looks suspiciously like it might be filled with mimosa. Clarke isn’t _positive_ a University-sponsored event would serve alcohol at twelve in the afternoon, but. It’s SUNY, so who knows.

“Right, so, croissants?” Bellamy asks, clearly out of his element. Everyone else is wearing various shades of green and brown, with strappy sandals and canvas bags and those little bands of leather around their wrists and braided into their hair. There’s nothing _wrong_ with any of that, obviously, it’s just—in their blue jeans and t-shirts, Clarke and her friends stand out a bit.

“That sounds great,” Clarke confirms, glancing around for Lincoln, who has apparently been honed in on by a group of raw vegans. Clarke has nothing against raw vegans, inherently, but she’s never actually met one that wasn’t unbearable, and Lincoln is looking a little like a damsel in extreme distress. “Be right back.”

That’s where everything goes wrong, naturally. It was a stupid plan, to be honest; you should _never_ split up in a horror movie.

The first group that finds her seem well-meaning enough. They’re all self-professed “big-thinkers,” wanting to join the Peace Corps after school and then go on to fund the first boarding school only for the paraplegic, agender and blind.

“What if they’re just blind and paraplegic?” Clarke wonders.

“They have hospitals for that,” the woman says, like it’s obvious.

“But anyway that’s enough about us, what is it you’re studying?” her boyfriend—or maybe brother? It was hard to understand—asks.

“I’m premed,” Clarke says, and involuntarily winces because she _knows_ what’s coming.

“Oh, that’s so impressive! What area of study?”

“Wow that must take so much work! I have no idea how I’d find the time to study.”

“What is it you want to do with your degree?” the man asks, and it feels like some sort of test that Clarke isn’t really interested in taking.

“I’m leaning towards art therapy,” she says, and watches the respect slowly drain from their faces. She can’t wait to introduce them to Bellamy, a Classics major, who wants to teach history at a Catholic school, because they pay more. That’ll go over great.

“But how do you think that will affect the _big picture_?” the woman asks, and Clarke shrugs.

“I don’t really know. I’ve never thought about it. If you’ll excuse me, my housemate needs me over there.”

She really is intending to go save Lincoln, now that she’s successfully escaped herself. She _really_ is, but without really meaning to, she quickly finds herself in the middle of a heated debate regarding bisexuality’s influence on modern media—and whether or not celebrities “suddenly coming out as bi” are giving a bad name to the mainstream LGBT community. Obviously, she disagrees, and calls the wannabe William S. Burroughs a _repugnant biphobic fustilarian_ , for her trouble, before storming off. If she had a mic, she’d drop it.

Bellamy finds her, a glass of suspicious punch in each hand and a grin on his face. “Did you just call that guy a _fustilarian_?” he asks, delighted, and Clarke scowls. He passes her one of the glasses, which only helps a little.

“He deserved it,” she declares, downing the punch in one drink, smacking her lips a little as they tingle. Yep, _definitely_ alcohol. “And it’s _your_ fault,” she adds, poking him hard in the chest for emphasis. “You’re rubbing off on me.”

“Good,” he grins, and then dips down to speak low in her ear. “I want to rub off on you in the bathroom.” She shivers, and can feel his smirk when he presses his mouth to her jaw, the picture of chastity.

“Fine, but only because I’m still angry,” she decides, and he practically _purrs_ as she drags him down the hall.

Lincoln might have to wait for that rescue.

By the time they get back, the meeting has evolved a bit. There are _tables and chairs_ now, that weren’t there before, and Clarke almost feels embarrassed when she sees Lincoln’s saved them both seats across the room.

“You were supposed to get to know _other people_ ,” Lincoln says, amused.

“Hey, don’t be so hard on her, she called some guy a fustilarian today,” Bellamy grins, and Clarke tosses her hair back primly. Up at the front of the room, someone is giving a speech about moss graffiti, which actually sounds kind of cool.

“Shut up,” she says, fighting a grin and reaching for another glass of the spiked punch stuff. It’s sort of like a screwdriver, but with grapefruit juice instead, and possibly tequila. She’s not really sure. “I’m trying to learn, here.”

They booked separate hotel rooms, because Lincoln has a steady income and it’s a Motel 8 so the rooms aren’t all that expensive, and also because Clarke is _very_ attached to the idea of hotel sex.

Except by the time they get to their room, she’s had at least five more glasses of the punch—possibly more. She stopped counting after three, so she could pretend she wasn’t being irresponsible—and she’s giggly and not totally in control of all of her limbs. She flops back on the mattress with a huff, and Bellamy grins down at her, all fondness. He’s not a huge fan of mixed drinks, so he’s a lot more sober, which is fine. It means she’ll probably wake up with a bottle of water and some ibuprofen next to her on the night stand, because her boyfriend is secretly a middle-aged mom.

“Everyone calls you the dad,” she declares, pouting a little, and Bellamy squints from where he’s trying to peel her jeans off for her, like he’s trying to follow her train of thought.

“What?”

Clarke chooses to ignore the question, and nearly kicks him in the face when she tries to help with her pants. “They’re wrong though,” she sighs. “You’re not the dad friend, you’re the _mom_ friend.”

“ _What?_ ”

“You’re totally the mom friend,” Clarke nods, agreeing with herself, while Bellamy roots around in their bag for her pajama shorts. “You make everyone hydrate.”

“Only when you drink your bodyweight in rum,” he defends. “Or coffee.”

Clarke grins stupidly. She’s pretty far gone for him, even with all his maternal habits. “You’re a neat freak,” she points out. “You go nuts if you don’t vacuum, or something.”

Bellamy frowns, tossing her shorts at her, turning petulant. “Only because I know no one else will!”

“Hey,” she tries to grab his hand, but her arms are off, so she just flails a little instead. He seems to get the message though, and moves towards her, straddling her down on the bed. “You’re not a single mom,” she says, serious, because he _has_ to know. Honestly, she’s amazed he doesn’t, yet. “I’m the dad friend.”

Bellamy snorts, leaning down to press his face against her hair. She can feel him breathing, like he’s taking her in. “The dad friend?”

“I love my kids and want to take care of them, but I’m too distant and clumsy with emotions to be good at it.”

Bellamy pulls back so he can look at her. “That was remarkably coherent.”

“Your face is remarkably coherent.”

“That’s more like it.” He leans down to press his mouth against her forehead, so gentle it makes her sigh. “Clarke, you’re amazing. You take such good care of everyone, okay?”

“Not everyone,” she argues, voice muffled by his shoulder when she turns to press her face against him. “Just our kids.”

“ _Our kids_ , huh?”

She rolls her eyes, even though he can’t see them. “Duh. We’re the parents.”

Bellamy’s voice is wry. “You know we’re not _actually_ parents, right?”

“We should be,” Clarke hums, and she’s not so drunk that she doesn’t notice the way he tenses up underneath her. “We’d make great parents. I’d totally co-parent with you.”

“Is this your way of saying you want to have my babies?” He sounds a little off, so Clarke wiggles a bit and pulls away, to see his face. And then she has to kiss him. It’s not her fault, it’s just the rule. You see Bellamy Blake, you kiss him, everyone knows that.

“I love you,” she sighs against his mouth in the middle of it, and his breath hitches. “I know I shouldn’t say it now, because I’m drunk, but I’ll say it when I’m sober, too. If it’ll make you feel better.”

Bellamy’s hand trails up her side, coming to rest on her back, holding her to him. “That would make me feel better,” he agrees, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “Go to sleep, Clarke.”

“I’ll remember,” she warns him, muzzily. Everything seems a little blurry around the edges, and then she realizes it’s because she’s closed her eyes. “I won’t forget.”

“Me neither. We’ll talk when we wake up.”

Clarke wakes up to the sound of a shower, and rolls over to find the bed empty beside her. There’s a bottle of water and two maroon pills on the night stand that makes her grin, and she doesn’t bother getting dressed before heading into the bathroom. Clouds of steam have already started to fill the air, and the mirror’s going foggy. The shower is the bathtub kind, with a curtain instead of glass doors, so Bellamy probably hasn’t noticed her come in. That’s fine; she’ll surprise him.

He hisses a little when she gets in and immediately mouths at the skin of his back. There’s shampoo in his hair, turning it white and sudsy and making it stick up at odd angles. She reaches up to help rinse it out.

“Sleep well?” he wonders, voice tight, and she knows he thinks she doesn’t remember, and she knows he won’t bring it up. He probably thinks she didn’t actually mean it, and that thought nearly makes her laugh, because—seriously, how can he _not know_?

“Hm,” she hums in agreement, pressing another kiss to his shoulder blade. “I love you.”

She grins when he starts to turn, but barely has a second to think when he wraps her up and presses her back against the tile until she shudders at the sudden cold. He’s running his mouth down her neck, licking at her breasts almost desperately, and it takes her a moment to realize he’s saying something, the same words over and over.

 _I love you, I love you, I love you so much_.

“Me too,” she says, ragged, and he grins as he kisses her.

Lincoln’s waiting by the car again when they finally make it out, hair still damp and curling, shivering a little in the brisk spring air. He’s holding a stack of folders, the kind sold for a dollar at Staples, with little pockets inside and the metal hooks that Clarke always manages to stab herself with in the finger.

He passes her the first one, with a Lisa Frank dolphin pattern that says YOU’RE A STAR in bright chrome letters.

“What’s this?” she asks, even as she thumbs through the papers, while Bellamy loads the bags into the trunk. They look like the kind of forms she’s filled out in hospital lobbies, or dental offices. The important kind.

“They need to know who’s planning on running the house next year,” he shrugs, folding himself into the driver’s seat. “I figured you two would probably do it.”

Clarke glances over at Bellamy, who shrugs before slipping into the car. Clarke buckles herself into the backseat, and then looks up to see he’s handing her a pen, one of the ballpoint ones he keeps in his pocket at all times, just in case he hears a word he’ll want to look up later, or something. He really is a nerd.

“Co-parents, right?” he grins, and she takes the pen with a laugh.

“Co-parents,” she confirms. She writes down their names as The Proclaimers start up through the speakers. She even starts humming along.


End file.
